How To Change Your YouTube Video Thumbnail Image?

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Graywolf teased us a bit in his video entry here, and below about a technique that can set your YouTube thumbnail image. Here’s his video.


So, does it work? I tested it out, after trying the math in my head. I’m probably wrong, but we’ll see.

It worked! See the black video overlay with the message?

This post from Crunchnotes, and the comments, are postulating that it is the center/middle of the video. That’s what I did above. However, YouTube says here that it’s not possible.

How do I change the default thumbnail for my video?
While we may add this feature in the future, there is currently no way to change the screen shot that we capture from your videos for thumbnails.

The other theory is that you can set something called a “poster frame” in your video editing tool. I did not try that, and a quick look around in my Sony Vegas DVD software package tutorial and I can’t find anything about how to do that.


20,000 points to anyone who can solve this mystery?

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  • Haven
    It's definitely the exact center frame of the video (at least for .avi files). I've uploaded a number of videos to YouTube, and each thumbnail is the frame at the exact middle point of the video, including the milliseconds. So if you upload a 3-minute long video (3:00:00), the thumbnail will be the frame that is at exactly 1:30:00. If you upload a 2:48:66 video, then the thumbnail will be the frame at 1:24:33. If you want to prove it to yourself, open a few of your uploaded videos in an editing program (e.g. Windows Movie Maker). Look at the video length, then divide it in half. The frame at that exact midpoint will be the thumbnail.
  • cinetech
    I've added more info in my website:

    How To Set Up The Right Poster Frame In YouTube
    http://www.squidoo.com/youtubeframe/
  • Don
    Sometimes when I do a search in Google I see links for videos and sometimes the video thumbnail is there and sometimes it isn't. Do you know what type of program or software you need to make your thumbnail display like that?
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