How to Set a Picture as a YouTube Thumbnail

YouTube is a Google-owned video hosting website that allows users to upload their own videos and provide custom descriptions for them. To give viewers an idea of a video's content, YouTube generates a thumbnail image from within the video file that represents the video in search listings. Users who upload their own videos can change this setting and select a different image as the video's thumbnail, though the thumbnail can't be changed until after the video is finished being processed by the site.

Instructions

1. Log in to your YouTube account. Click your username in the upper left corner of the site once you've logged in and select the "My Videos" option from the drop-down menu that appears.

2. Browse through the listing of your videos to locate the video you wish to set the thumbnail picture for. Click the "Edit" button to access the video information page.

3. Locate the "Video Thumbnail" portion of the video information page. Three images from different parts of the video will be present, representing the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 points of the video. Click the thumbnail image you want to select it.

4. Click the "Save Changes" button located at the bottom of the video information page. The new thumbnail may not appear immediately, but will appear on the video listing once the change has been processed by YouTube.

Tips & Warnings

• YouTube processing time varies from a few minutes to several hours depending on the size of the video file, its format and its upload speed.

• YouTube doesn't allow you to select your own frames as a thumbnail; you can only select one of the YouTube-generated thumbnail images. Likewise, you can't import an unrelated image as the thumbnail for a video.

References

• YouTube Help: Picking a Video Thumbnail