How to Insert a YouTube Thumbnail
Including links to YouTube videos is one way to add free content and entertainment to your website. A fitness site, for example, can provide users with links to YouTube exercise videos. YouTube makes it possible for you to decorate your links by making video thumbnails available to anyone who knows how to find them. These thumbnails -- which appear next to YouTube search results -- contain images from their associated videos. To insert a YouTube thumbnail into your Web page, find one you like and add it to your HTML code.
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Instructions
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Visit YouTube and type the name of a video you would like to view into the Search text box at the top of the page. Click "Search." YouTube returns a list of thumbnail images of videos that match your query.
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Right-click one of the thumbnails, and then click "Copy." A menu containing options appears.
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Click "Copy Image Location" if you use Firefox. If you use Opera or Safari, click "Copy Image Address." Click "Copy Link Address" if you use Google Chrome. To copy the thumbnail's address using Internet Explorer, click "Properties," highlight the URL appearing next to Address and press "CTRL" and "C." Windows copies the thumbnail's URL to the system clipboard.
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Launch Notepad or an HTML editor, and open an HTML document. Paste the following code into the document's body section:
<a href="paste_copied_thumbnail_URL_here">
<img alt="YouTube Thumbnail" src="paste_copied_video_URL_here" />
</a>
Replace "paste_copied_thumbnail_URL_here" with the URL you copied.
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Return to the YouTube page, and click the thumbnail. A new page opens and plays the video. The video's URL appears in your browser's address bar at the top of the browser.
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Copy that URL using your mouse, and return to the HTML document. Replace "paste_copied_video_URL_here" with the URL you copied. The HTML code now contains the URL of the thumbnail and the URL of the YouTube video linked to that thumbnail.
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Save the document and view it in any browser. The thumbnail image appears.
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Click the thumbnail. Your browser takes you to the video associated with that thumbnail and plays it.
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Tips & Warnings
You don't have to make your YouTube thumbnail images do anything if you do not care to. If you simply want to display a thumbnail on your page, add it to your page as shown in this example:
<img alt="YouTube Thumbnail" src="paste_copied_thumbnail_URL_here" />.
Replace "paste_copied_thumbnail_URL_here" with the URL of the thumbnail image you copy from YouTube.
