The old saying that readers will often judge a book by its cover is true, and the same goes for viewers that judge videos by their thumbnails. So ensure that you have custom thumbnails enabled on your YouTube Channel so you can upload your own images to the viewer as they browse for something interesting or entertaining to watch.

How To Enable Custom Thumbnails on YouTube

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your profile logo in the top right hand corner. Click this and then go to settings. From here you need to click on the view additional features link, which will then show you all the YouTube features that are available and whether or not you have access to them.

There are no views, subscribers, or watch time requirements to unlock custom thumbnails. All you need to do is verify your YouTube account. And you can do that from this very screen. Next to your profile logo and channel name at the top, you will find a blue verify button. Click that to start the process. To verify your YouTube account, Google will send you a verification code to a phone number either through an automated voice or text message, which you can choose on the screen. Do note so you can only verify two YouTube accounts per phone number, per year.

Once you put your phone number, click submit, and you should see this screen that asks you for that verification code. Whichever solution you decide to use, you should almost instantly get a ping on your phone in this example I requested a text message, which sent me the verification code. Now all you need to do is go back to your computer, input the six digit verification code, click submit and that will verify your account. Which instantly gives you access to adding custom thumbnails to your videos.

Why Custom Thumbnails on YouTube are Critical to Success

Now for a very quick demonstration on why custom thumbnails are so important. This video you see on screen is about how to download a thumbnail from YouTube. But the current thumbnail for this video that's been selected by YouTube automatically is a rather useless picture of myself that tells the viewer absolutely nothing. But with the help of a custom thumbnail, we can tell a much more colorful, intriguing, and direct visual story that might just earn this video an extra click.

Here's a very simple way to look at it. We increase the number of clicks we get on our videos, (this is called click through rates) by more than 100% simply by making better thumbnails. So remember, you can make a fantastic video, but if you can't get people through the door then it is a waste of time. Pay attention to that first impression.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Custom YouTube thumbnail example with a padlock icon and bold text on blue background.

Enabling custom thumbnails is one of the easiest but most important things you can do for your YouTube channel. We show you how.

How to Enable Custom Thumbnails On YouTube

If you’re new to YouTube, or you just want to up your YouTube game, then learning how to create the most effective custom thumbnails is absolutely essential. Just as readers judge books by their covers, viewers judge videos by their thumbnails. It's unavoidable. You have just a tiny window of opportunity to grab that person's attention and draw them into your video. So let's jump into how to make custom thumbnails.

Custom Thumbnails on YouTube: Your Winning Feature

When you upload a video to YouTube, the platform will select a few options for thumbnails based on the content of the video. But the chances are very, very high that the frames selected will be off the mark and tell the viewer absolutely nothing. But with the help of a custom thumbnail, we can tell a much more colorful, intriguing, and direct visual story that might just earn this video an extra click.

And here is the good news. To start using custom thumbnails, you don't need a single view, subscriber, or minute of watch time, but you do need to verify your YouTube account. Verifying your YouTube account to unlock custom thumbnails, along with lots of other things, has just jumped to the top of your YouTube priority list. Get it done now. Now you've got access to custom thumbnails, let's have a look at some of the technical aspects of how to create them.

The minimum recommended resolution is 1280 by 720. If you go any higher, then you're gonna face two problems. First of all, when you start to create really high resolution images, when you shrink them down to thumbnail preview size, they can look a little weird. But more importantly, YouTube has a very restrictive file size when it comes to thumbnails. You have just two meg to play with. Keep that in mind if you intend to create really complex images. And finally, make sure to save your thumbnails in one of the following file formats. JPEG, GIF, or jiff, BMP, and PNG.

Another advantage of creating thumbnails at this resolution is that it matches the aspect ratio of how 99.9% of your potential audience will see them, which is the classic 16 by 9 widescreen shape. If you stick to these basic YouTube thumbnail principles, you should be off and running.

Custom Thumbnails on YouTube: The 10% Rule

Pay attention folks, because if there is one thing you take away from this guide, it's this next tip. It is absolutely crucial for the success of your thumbnails. When you design your thumbnail, you get the whole experience, but everybody else gets a smaller experience, and I like to call it the 10% rule. At full size, this thumbnail looks colorful, but pretty basic. There are maybe three elements to it. A person, and object, and a background. However, when you shrink it down to 10% of its original size, is everything you saw before still recognizable and easy to understand? It's the same for YouTube thumbnails as seen on mobile devices, although this might be more the 25% rule, or the 30% rule. Basically when you create your custom thumbnail, make sure to shrink it down to 10% of its size to see how everybody else is gonna see that thumbnail when it ends up on YouTube.

Great Custom Thumbnails: Higher Click Through Rates

Hopefully every YouTube content creator is aware of their click through rate. Every time a viewer sees one of your thumbnails, that counts as an impression. Every time somebody clicks on one of those thumbnails, that is a view, of course And you can calculate the click-through rate from that. For example, let's say your thumbnail is shown 100 times, and it's clicked on 10 times, that's 10% click-through rate. Basically, click-through rate is a representation of how powerful and effective your titles and your thumbnails are.

To review the click-through rate on your channel, you will need to go to the new YouTube Studio beta. From the dashboard screen, click on Analytics, and then from the top row of tabs, click on Reach Viewers, and finally Impressions to click-through rate box. A question that's often asked at this point is, what is a good click-through rate? And YouTube's answer is between 2% and 10%. But what I would say is forget all that and set your current click-through rate as a benchmark and aim to improve on that. The reason I say that is because it's impossible to compare your click-through rate to anybody else's because the type of content, and the style of a channel, and the size of a channel, amongst many other things, can have a huge influence on how many people click on your thumbnails. All that you should be doing is working with the numbers you know and understand. Working with somebody else's numbers is going to drive you utterly insane. The exciting thing is that as click through rate goes up, so does everything else!

Custom Thumbnails: Keep on the Right Side of YouTube

Time for a little bit of fun. Did you know that Google can tell you all sorts of things about your thumbnail, which are unnervingly accurate, including, really importantly for YouTube, whether or not your thumbnail is safe. A great tool for checking a thumbnail is safe is 

, and it’s free to use right now. All you need to do is upload a thumbnail to it and it will spit out the following information. It can tell me, with 94% confidence, that the main emotion in this thumbnail is surprise. It knows this thumbnail contains a person, a man, in fact, and it can even pick out the traffic sign. It's even trying to pick out specific body parts and actions. Perhaps the most important tab, however, is the last one, Safe Search. This tells us how safe Google thinks the image is, and we know that YouTube does analyze thumbnails to ensure that they are safe for the viewer. So if you do create a thumbnail that is a little edgy, it might be a good idea to run it through this first. Cloud Vision is certainly an impressive glance into the world of artificial intelligence.

Man pointing at YouTube custom thumbnail size limit text with vidIQ logo on blue background

Beyond the video content itself, custom thumbnails are probably the most important YouTube tool you have in your arsenal. Take a look at our essential guide and get it right first time, every time.

How to Make Custom Thumbnails - The Essential Guide!

Want to download your own thumbnail from YouTube? When you are logged into YouTube you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens. If you click on that you have the option to go to 

, this is currently in beta, but will become the standard as 2019 progresses.

To download a thumbnail from one of your own YouTube videos in the new Studio click on the Videos section where you will find all your videos listed with the most recent first. Click on a video to jump to the edit page and under the basics tab you should see a selection of potential thumbnails selected from the video and your current thumbnail if it is a custom one. There should be a box with three dots inside the current thumbnail. If you click on that you have the option to replace it with a new thumbnail or download the existing one.

When you click 'download', the image may appear in a new web browser where you can do the usual right click and save. One thing to note, it doesn't matter what resolution you uploaded the thumbnail as, it will always be downloaded as 1280 by 720.

If you need a quick and easy way to save thumbnails from any YouTube video, try our free tool:

YouTube Thumbnail Downloader – HD Quality

Just paste the video URL, and our tool instantly grabs the thumbnail in high definition. No need to mess with URLs or search for the video ID—it’s simple, fast, and works on any public video.

But if you're curious how to do it manually, here’s the process:

You can download any thumbnail from any YouTube video manually as long as the video is public. You'll need the 

, which you can find in the watch page URL—it’s the random collection of numbers and letters that comes after the equal symbol. So highlight all of that and copy it.

On a new browser tab, type in the following URL. Replace 

*https://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/maxresdefault.jpg*

Once inserted, you should be able to press enter or click go and you should now see the thumbnail from that video. So that's how you download any thumbnail from any video on YouTube. But you have to be careful about why you're doing this. If you just want it for your own personal use, say to look at a larger version of the thumbnail and see if there are any good strategies and tactics you can use in your own thumbnails, that's fine. It's when you want to use it for broadcast or commercial purposes.

Remember, a creator's video is their own copyrighted material and the same goes for the thumbnail. So if you want to use this thumbnail in your own content then you should really ask permission from the video creator. Of course you could use the thumbnails in your content and claim fair usage as educational or transformative content, but that's a topic for another video.....

Did you know that vidIQ has an awesome custom thumbnail generator tool that's free to use? You can create and edit the best thumbnails for your YouTube videos to maximise your click through rates - more details on 

YouTube thumbnail icon with 2019 edition label and download folder symbol with arrow.

Everything you wanted to know about downloading YouTube thumbnails but were afraid to ask. vidIQ brings you all the details.

How to Download a YouTube Thumbnail (New Method)

 Let's jump straight into this one with a question. What do the most impactful thumbnails have in common? The answer is, while they are all a very high-quality images, they are pretty simple with only two or three main elements. That means that when you shrink them down to 10% of their original design size, in other words: thumbnail preview size.

 The best thumbnails are custom - not just still frames from the videos. They are dedicated, professionally shot, professionally edited images, designed to tease you about what's inside the video.

 Unless you capture the perfect moment during your film, and the chances are you will need to create a prepared shot. If you're wondering how video creators get the YouTuber look, they often create poses in front of the camera, then create interesting foregrounds and backgrounds that contrast with each event. This way, you ensure the viewer directs their eyes to the things you want to highlight in your thumbnail.

 The next question you need to ask is, does the image show emotion and, or excitement? If you’re including a face in the thumbnail you’ll want to focus in on the whites of the eyes - that creates a better human relationship.

 Of course, not all thumbnails can convey emotion - particularly if there's not a person in the thumbnail. But they should all be able to tell some sort of story. If the viewer can take an educated guess at the content of the video from the thumbnail, then the thumbnail is doing its job. Custom thumbnails should create intrigue, entertainment or excitement, while teasing a simple, yet powerful message, that compels you to click and find out more.

 Another common trait of awesome thumbnails is consistency. And we're not just talking about quality. Each channel creates a style that you can see throughout their thumbnails. The goal should be to create thumbnails the viewer can instantly recognize as your thumbnails from your channel.

 A vibrant thumbnail is a great thumbnail. But this isn't achieved without a little work. Video creators edit their images to be more colorful and sharper at a smaller size so they pop out of the screen. In Photoshop, you can add an image adjustment layer on top of a simple thumbnail to increase the saturation to make the color pop just that little bit harder. The effect may seem subtle but when you throw it onto YouTube, where it's competing against everybody else's thumbnails, it can have a huge impact.

 Text should be used very sparingly. No more than two or three words. Remember, you have a video title to do that - and the last thing you want to do is regurgitate your title in the thumbnail. That’s a very common mistake. As with everything, there are exceptions to this rule. And if you are doing something that is very educational and needs to say exactly what it does on a tin, then it may be valuable to use a text. But try and keep it as limited as possible. Probably no more than five or six words.

 Always remember YouTube alignments. You cannot avoid this timestamp blotting your thumbnail. Just be aware that it is always on the bottom right hand corner of your thumbnail or you'll end up with a problem.

 Now there is something to remember about all of these thumbnail tips, tricks and guidance. Once you know them, don't be afraid to break them. Which brings us back to the most efficient thumbnail ever created on YouTube. One color, 17 million views. This is a disruptor. Something that follows no rules and because of that it stands out as something totally unique. It helps that the title is perfect too. It challenges your understanding and compels you to click, to get an answer to the question that's in your head, which is, what does this mean?

Here at vidIQ, our thumbnails have consistent branding, consistent themes, and consistent colors. Above are all the thumbnail guidelines we’ve started to follow more religiously in the last year. And the results speak for themselves. We've increased click-through rate (that's how many times people click on our thumbnails) by 100% in the last 12 months. If you're unfamiliar with how click-through rate works we cover this in detail with our thumbnails essential guide. Check the 

Here's my challenge to you. The next time you're on YouTube watching your favorite video creators, take a look at their thumbnails and ask yourself, why do I click on this content? Take those answers and spend twice as long as you usually would do creating your next thumbnail. Because as I said at the top of this video, better thumbnails lead to more clicks. Let's do this.

Man thinking with YouTube play button and word "Thumbnails" in background, vidIQ logo.

Awesome custom thumbnails lead to more views and more clicks. It's as simple as that. Here are 10 reasons why some custom thumbnails work and others don't.

10 Reasons Why Some Custom Thumbnails Work and Others Don't

Welcome to another in our exclusive series about getting the most out of 

, but what about the thumbnails you have used for the videos you’ve already published?. Your previous endeavors in the world of creating imagery probably wasn't that great. At vidiQ our thumbnails have certainly evolved in the past year - now we are more consistent with colors, and use much less text.

We know for a fact that our thumbnails are better than what they used to be because of data. If we look at our YouTube click-through rate analytics, it tells us that people are twice as likely to click on our videos now than they were this time last year. So, should you go back through your old videos and update the thumbnails to the skills you have now in the hope that you will get more clicks and more views? Well, this case study might answer that question.

Vevo: Updating YouTube Custom Thumbnails Generated Millions of Extra Views

Even VEVO, one of the largest providers of musical content on YouTube, 

admitted to their own failing when it came to custom thumbnails

. Nine months ago, they decided to embark on a hugely ambitious project to update the thumbnails on thousands of their videos, including this one for 

. The thumbnail went from looking like on the one on the left to the one on the tight:

The short term effect was quite staggering. After the initial surge of views things were starting to flatline, but that switch in thumbnail was just the injection the video needed. The switch-up gave the video an immediate jolt in views, as well as more evergreen momentum afterwards. Vevo confirm that the thumbnail change for that specific video resulted in a 4000% increase in views over a two week period.

Now, obviously a sample size of just one is going to give you some pretty extraordinary results, but what about if you do this over 4000 videos. Well, that's exactly what Vevo did and this is what happened. On average, there was a marked increase in views over a 20 day period, before leveling off to an improved rate of over 5%, compared to how the videos performed prior to the thumbnail change.

Why You Should Update Your YouTube Custom Thumbnails to Generate More Views

So, this is a no brainer, isn't it? I need to go through all of the terrible thumbnails I was making three years ago, update them all, and I'm guaranteed views. Not so fast. It's important to remember that pretty much every video Vevo releases comes with some traction of view velocity, so that even a few years down the line, that video will be getting hundreds of thousands or views.

For smaller channels who have less views overall, and less evergreen content, it's pointless to change the thumbnails on video that are not driving traffic and expect that to suddenly change. You need to think smartly and be selective. Choose the videos that already have evergreen value on your channel by checking your real time analytics in YouTube Studio. When you first open real time analytics, it will show you videos by most recent, but you can sort by which videos are bringing in the most views over the last 48 hours or 60 minutes. If you sort by either of these, you can soon pick out the videos that could be months, even years old, and still bringing in views. This is called evergreen content, and what you can do is identify videos that are still performing well but look like they have terrible thumbnails.

Comparison of YouTube thumbnails showing low vs high click-through rate performance.

Uploading eye-catching custom thumbnails for your YouTube videos is vital, but will changing old thumbnails help generate more views? Check out these insights from Vevo.

How Updating Custom Thumbnails Generated Millions of Extra Views for Vevo

 and best practices, we spoke to one of the very best thumbnail artists in the business, 

 are the creators behind the wildly popular 

 series. Creating stand-out custom thumbnails for their content is an integral part of the process, and Vy gave us a sneak peek into what works across their YouTube channels.

Over the past few years, Vy and her team have been testing and refining the type of thumbnails that drive viewers to click through to watch. It’s a strategy that’s worked to generate a combined 

 across the five YouTube channels Vy manages. She gives us some exclusive insights into the use of color, graphics and text to create the perfect image.

#1Use Color to Make Custom Thumbnails Pop

Take a look at any of Vy and Chad’s YouTube channels and the first thing that hits you about the custom thumbnails is the extraordinary use of color. As experts in the game this is absolutely intentional.

Vy explains that the content they create appeals to a younger demographic who respond really well to bright and vibrant colors. In order to maximise the appeal of the thumbnails, Vy and her team play with, enhance, and even radically change the colors on the image until the get the results they know will work.

Using just Photoshop, colors are saturated, backgrounds are blurred to make the foreground objects stand out, and drop shadows and outer glows are used to further make those objects or text pop. Vy will also separate out the background and foreground on different layers for added image clarity and depth. To break this process down further, let’s take a look at the thumbnail Vy and her team created for ‘

You can see the image-editing expertise fully in action on this thumbnail. Vy has used a fairly blurred 2 color background on one layer, with herself and the hacker on another layer. The two figures have been outlined using the outer glow tool so they stand out, drawing the viewer's attention to Vy’s bright jacket and the white mask of the hacker.

The jacket is actually blue denim but Vy changes the color for every thumbnail she wears it for based on the other colors she's using. The team mix and match complementary colors based on the background and the objects in the thumbnail, and Vy will often change the color of the jacket so it’s the opposite to what anyone else in the thumbnail is wearing. So while it looks like Vy owns 30 denim jackets of the same design, it’s actually just the one clothing item that’s been manipulated to bring out the very best in the custom thumbnail.

Vy and the team also use colors to create a sense of consistency across their thumbnails with splashes of the same color popping up across different images. This creates a motif that runs through their thumbnails and reinforces the branding and familiarity of the channels.

#2 Keep Text on Custom Thumbnails to an Absolute Minimum

Another thing you’ll notice from the thumbnails created across Vy’s, Chad’s and the Project Hacker YouTube channels is that text is kept to an absolute minimum, or not used at all.

Obviously this creates extra pressure on the designer who has to get the focus of the content over without spelling it out for the viewer. Vy and her team are world-class experts at this and know exactly when to use text only when necessary. When they do, it’s big and bright and it counts.

Vy confirms that a lot of rookie mistakes she sees with custom thumbnails on YouTube is trying to cram in as much text as possible. Unfortunately, it becomes almost impossible to read when you shrink the thumbnail down. When the graphic becomes too busy the viewer is going to have a hard time understanding what your video is about and they may not even click through to find out.

Vy’s team have solid rules for text use: use three words or less for any thumbnail, keep that text precise, and only ever use if it makes the story complete. Also, think about the colors you use for the text to make it stand out. And don’t repeat the title in the thumbnail - ever!

Another vital component of the successful custom thumbnails that Vy and her team create is the use of emotion to draw viewers in. If just one person is in the thumbnail, they will use the face that shows the stronger emotion, and if there are two or more people, each will have a slightly different emotion to foster attention. This is incredibly important for capturing the eyeballs of the younger audiences scrolling through the YouTube feed on their mobile devices.

Another very effective way of conveying a strong emotion in a person is to actually show the whites of their eyes. Vy spends a lot of time on faces and knows how to make the most out of them. In the thumbnail for ‘

’ Vy accentuated Chad’s green iris and the whites of his eyes with Photoshop’s Saturation tool to make them really come alive. This really helps when it comes to the human connection.

But Vy goes even further to create a sense of emotion with viewers. Not only does she want to attract viewers with facial expressions, but also with a sense of action and purpose from the people featured in the image. As this is rarely achieved from someone just standing still, she makes sure that Chad, herself, or the Hacker are in some kind of motion - like running or fighting back. The aim is to create a need for the audience to find out what happens next.

#4 Don’t Make the Custom Thumbnail an Afterthought

The art of the thumbnail is something Vy’s team considers before shooting even begins. The topic of the video, and the story around it is a critical starting point for the graphic. The base image isn’t taken from a screenshot, it’s shot separately and taken from one of many images created during the photoshoot.

Vy will take multiple shots from multiple angles so she has a wide range of creative assets to work from. Thumbnails are never an afterthought for the team, and are as important as creating the main video content.

#5 Keep on Testing Thumbnails - and Replace if You Need To

Vy will monitor click through rate very closely after uploading a video, and is quick to respond if she feels a thumbnail it isn’t working as well as she expects. She tracks the click through rates of all of their custom thumbnails in a spreadsheet and analyses the data for performance insights. But as an expert, she’ll use her experience and instinct to change up a thumbnail within the first 48 hours if the video isn’t getting the views - even before she can confirm the CTR. Talking of 

Huge thanks to Vy for letting vidIQ in on her insights and process around creating the best custom thumbnails on YouTube. As you can see, creators who are pulling in millions of views never leave their thumbnail to chance. And you shouldn't either. For a recap of this expert's guide to creating stunning YouTube custom thumbnails, check out our video below:

Want To Get More YouTube Views & Subscribers?

Woman in patterned hoodie angrily confronting masked person in black with neon gloves.

We give you 5 expert tips on why creating the best YouTube custom thumbnails should NEVER be an afterthought if you want to grow views and subscribers fast.

YouTube Custom Thumbnails

How to Enable Custom Thumbnails On YouTube

How to Make Custom Thumbnails - The Essential Guide!

How to Download a YouTube Thumbnail (New Method)

10 Reasons Why Some Custom Thumbnails Work and Others Don't

How Updating Custom Thumbnails Generated Millions of Extra Views for Vevo

Why YouTube Custom Thumbnails Should NEVER Be an Afterthought: 5 Expert Tips