Mark W. Shead

Michael Gray has an interesting, but very un-informative post about how to change your thumbnail on You Tube.  Basically he tells everyone that it can be changed, you need a stopwatch, but he doesn’t tell anyone how.  In the comments he specifically says that he doesn’t want to tell anyone how to do it because he wants to “teach a man to fish”.

I subscribed to he blog the other day because I thought he might have something to say that might be useful and actually save me some time.

For anyone trying to figure out how to change your Youtube Thumbnail, this is what you can find from his video.  The thumbnail image occurs at 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video. The video is 66 seconds long, so there are three possibilities:

1. You  Tube grabs a frame between 29 and 34 seconds from the beginning of the video.
2. You Tube grabs a frame 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video.
3. You Tube grabs the center frame of the video.

I would guess option 3 which would explain the extra second of staring at the camera on his video.

A much more helpful post reaches the same conclusion here.

If this is the case you should be able to add a single frame to You Tube to control the thumbnail.  It might even be short enough that it wouldn’t even show up in the video. (Of course you’d need to get something more accurate than a stop watch. )