YouTube gives you three choices for your thumbnail image. It can be very frustrating sometimes when you upload your video to YouTube and all three of your choices are shots of you with your eyes closed. We’ll fear not. Although it may seem like the YouTube thumbnails are randomly selected, they are not.
In fact you can control your own destiny when it coming to the YouTube thumbnail image, if you pay attention during the editing process. You see, it is quite simple. YouTube always picks the same three frames. The first one is the middle frame, the absolute middle of your time-line. So, if your video is 6 minutes long, the frame that exists at the 3 minute mark is going to be your poster frame.
If you divide again by one half on either side, you get the other two frames. So going back to the 6 minute video example, your poster frames would be at the 1 minute 30 second mark ad the other at 4 minutes 30 seconds.
Armed with this knowledge, you can shift clips around so that you get a nice juicy frame on at least one of those three points. Having a visually appealing poster frame is one of the best things you can do to increase your views on YouTube, so make it count! A healthy dose of sex appeal never hurts. Or try to find a frame the sort of sums up the whole video. This will be the image that compels people to watch your video and I can make the difference between thousands of views and hundreds of thousands of views.
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December 6th, 2009 at 12:28 am
ello, Meekakitty (youtube channel) has thumbnails that arnt even on her videos how does she do that?
December 9th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Partner channels have the privilege of posting any thumbnail they want. Meekitty is a YouTube partner.
June 27th, 2010 at 12:22 am
Wow thanks for this wonderful info! I have been trying to figure this out forever! ^-^