Well-designed thumbnails give viewers a swift glimpse of what your video is about and what it contains. They grab the viewer’s attention when they are browsing, and depending on the image; people decide to play the video. So, if you want to attract more views to your YouTube videos, use better thumbnail images with the right size.
Size That Is Right
According to Google, the YouTube thumbnail size should be 1280×720. After you have uploaded your video, YouTube gives you three automatically generated thumbnail options to choose from or create a custom thumbnail.
You can pick from ready-made designs YouTube thumbnail templates and change them according to your requirements as they are fully customizable including text, the font, graphics, borders, placement of designs, and the background image.
You can also create a thumbnail image from scratch using YouTube thumbnail maker or various online apps that feature tools like background removal tool, sticker effect tool, stock photos, photo filters, custom fonts, and prebuilt templates which are very handy to create a YouTube thumbnail. However, the custom designed thumbnail image should be as large as possible because the image is also used as the preview image in the embedded player. Your custom YouTube Thumbnail should:
- Have a resolution of 1280×720 with a minimum width of 640 pixels
- It must be uploaded in image formats such as as.JPG, GIF, BMP, or.PNG.
- Should be under the 2MB limit.
- Use a 16:9 aspect ratio as it is the most used in YouTube players and previews
Best Practices for an Ideal YouTube Thumbnail Size
Professional Still Images: Still images are considered the best candidates but finding a still shot from a video is often problematic and can result in silly and embarrassing images. So, our smart advice is to have still shotted professionally taken while the video is being shot.
Bright & Contrasting Colored Graphics: Bright and contrasting colored graphics draw people’s eyes more than plain ones. Thus, use photo editing software and brighten your image’s colors and enhance saturation.
Include Whitespace: Whitespace or negative space creates a clean and organized look for your images. So, combining whitespace and contrasting colors and let it influence the eye movement of the viewers.
Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a YouTube Thumbnail Size
Difficult to Read Text: While your thumbnails should not be flashing large sized text because it distracts from the image but keep in mind, that text should not be too small that it becomes difficult to read, cluttered and unappealing.
Be Succinct And Not Descriptive: Try to include only the key features of your video into the title and the graphics in the thumbnails because too much text will create clutter and viewers will be less likely to click on videos with cluttered and too wordy images.
Avoid Irrelevant Images: Thumbnails are designed to grasp people’s attention, but irrelevant images only mislead people. Such an image will hurt the reputation and will be bad for repeat views. So, only select images that genuinely reflect your content.
Chris Mcdonald has been the lead news writer at complete connection. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing flows through in the expert industry coverage he provides. Chris is also an author of tech blog Area19delegate. He likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.