HOW TO MAKE YOUTUBE THUMBNAILS FOR FREE | Self-publish NOW Neil Mossey

HOW TO MAKE YOUTUBE THUMBNAILS FOR FREE | Self-publish NOW! 003 Neil Mossey



Hello welcome back to the Happy Hut - I'm Neil Mossey and I help as many people as possible to get ideas out of their heads and out into the world to make as many people happy as possible

One of the best ways of doing that is right here on YouTube

If you are looking for how to make a thumbnail for YouTube, I am so sorry, I feel your pain.
I'm so sorry that you are at that stage in your youtubing where you've realized that thumbnails are important and a thing
I put it off for years

Look at us.
A pair of unpaid google interns.
I mean we're slaves!

We're slaves to the YouTube algorithm so-- so yeah let's make our shackles and chains that bit more appealing.
I'm going to show you some of the things that I use to make my youtube thumbnails for free but man I hate it.

I hate making thumbnails.
Nobody likes making thumbnails.
You made a video, isn't that enough?

You've then got to upload it - right so you're doing video - done that... and then you've got to write your description - done that... words.

And now? And now you've got to start editing images?

I mean the hard thing is I'm actually quite good at Photoshop or the free equivalent GIMP - but I'm not gonna get Photoshop out to make a thumbnail.

I just want a place to just put the thumbnail in... add some words and then get it out again.
And over the months and years I've managed to find a few tools and a few techniques to do that as as easily as possible and completely for no money as possible.

But one thing I do promise you - hand on heart - I will not show you how to make those videos where you look surprised in the thumbnail.
You know those really stupid thumbnails? The really irritating thumbnails I'm not I'm not gonna do that I'm not gonna do that I promise you.

The broken jazz hands and look-of-shock thumbnail shot

Actually I'm gonna - that is - that is exactly the thumbnail that I'm gonna use on this video, just to make a point.

So let's jump into into YouTube this is what the tube studio dashboard looks like.
I've actually gone into my last video.
As you can see YouTube offers you three completely usable thumbnails.
They're quite, actually quite good at it
I think there must be some beast like software that can detect smiles and can avoid frames where your eyes are closed.

And I actually really like this thumbnail in the middle and that's the one I've selected.
But the first problem I had was that I actually want to add to that
I want to add some words to it
I might even want to add another picture

I could not work out how to export a thumbnail from YouTube
I finally did manage it but it's a little little bit of a workaround
If you have a cell phone or a mobile phone as we call it here in the UK, the way that I export thumbnails from YouTube - any one of the three that they offer you - is using this.

It's an app called YT studio
It's supposed to be the studio app for youtubing
When you go in there you can click on the dashboard

Click on "videos" from that pulldown menu, and choose the video that you want to play with
It gives you lots of details about the video but up here if you click on the pen icon you can actually edit the video from the app

And there's a little tool in here which is great
If you go into the thumbnail there are the three thumbnails and you can see them there.
So if you choose the one that you want to export... save it... select the one that you want and down there, hit "download thumbnail"

That downloads the thumbnail to your phone
Now if you go over to google photos there is the thumbnail ready for you in all its glory

So all you need to do now is to go to Google Photos, download that onto your computer, and use the software and that's what I'm going to use next
Now the next tool that I use for free is something called spark on Adobe.com, so I'll put the link in the description.

If you type in "spark.Adobe.com"
Now I know I'm scared of using Adobe products because man do they like to hold you upside down and shake you around for money, but this, I've been using this for about six months now
It's completely free - all you need to do is to set up an Adobe.com account which is free

I use that on my dirty email so they can't spam me with marketing messages
If you go into just the the opening page you'll see you can use their templates - the pre-loaded templates.

So this is my dashboard here in Spark.
To create a new thumbnail, or new project even, see this plus sign at the top of the page?
This is what will probably greet you when you go there for the first time - you sign in for the first time - and they offer you all these different templates you know.
There's a flyer or a slideshow but what they also offer are YouTube thumbnails!

So if I click on that down here on the right hand side look at all these pre-made YouTube thumbnails you can use.
See you could choose this one for instance

Click "create" and you can change absolutely anything on this template, so this block of text here?
If you click on the the pencil icon again - click Edit - you can change that to "my thumbnail"

Click "done" but you can make that bigger by dragging these corners here and it just it just works it all out for you

It's really lovely. You could change this picture at the back here and that's what, that's what we're gonna do at the moment, so I'm gonna go to some thumbnails that I've made in the past...
So as you can see it saves as you go along
I'll probably delete that - so I've developed a bit of a template for myself
Sometimes it might have four pictures in there - or one big picture and a block of text - and I think that's what I'm going to go with for this latest video

So what I'll do is, I'll duplicate a thumbnail that I've already made and we'll call it "transcribe thumbnail"

Hit duplicate - so it should have duplicated it here and it hasn't shown it on the dashboard, but if I go into "edit project" hopefully all the bits that I need will be there
There it is fantastic

I want a block of text, and I want the nice thumbnail that YouTube have already chosen for me, so firstly I'll change the block of text

I want that to run along the bottom there, and I can change this image - and you can change the image on the template thumbnails that they give you - so if I just click on the image and then I'll go up to "replace"

Now what I'll do is I'll upload the photo that I downloaded from Google photos because I downloaded it from the YouTube studio app .
I hope that makes sense

I've gone into Google photos and there is the thumbnail that YouTube offered which I liked and I'll click on download

Back into spark, if I hit upload photo, right so now I am uploading the thumbnail picture... there it is!
I want to make this text smaller, just so it runs along the bottom here, so what I would do is click "Edit" and I'll change the words

So we'll change this to something like "transcribe for free"
I want it big so it reads - so I might put it in the middle - or put it in the bottom - the bottom there - and it sort of works out all the proportions for you

You can change anything that you want on the, on the words, so you can change the font
I prefer the one I've got
You can change the colors, you can change the size or the line spacing and I've sometimes done that just to get more words in...

But it's a really brilliant resource to just be able to just sling in the words and sling in a picture and it saves as you go along so now if I hit download... so now that I've downloaded it I can now upload it as a thumbnail

And there it is - and that's it!
It really is such an easy way to just grab a thumbnail that youtube has offered
Maybe manipulate it a little bit or add some extra pictures, add some words, then download that image and then re-upload it as a thumbnail

So I hope this video has helped give you some ideas for how to export a thumbnail from YouTube - to give you somewhere to go for free - to manipulate it and some text maybe add any other images that you want to and then export and download that image that you can then use as a thumbnail

It's a little system that I've managed to use for a lot of videos now
If you've reached this point in the video and it has helped well why not give me a thumbs up just to let me know that someone reached this point in the video

And if you're feeling even kinder, if you were to hit on the subscribe button that would just show me some love that I crave - but also I'm craving subscribers - trying to get to a thousand subscribers - probably exactly the same as you...

One day we'll be monetized!
You and me... making thumbnails.
For little to no money, but in the meantime good luck with your thumbnail creating
I'll see you on the next video.


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