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Visual Design

Thumbnail Designer

Paste a script or topic and the designer asks OpenAI's gpt-image-1 for a landscape draft. Treat it as a starting point; the guide below shows how to turn it into a thumbnail that earns the click.

  • Free
  • Two drafts a day
  • No account needed
Generate a draft
Crop guideFrom the sizes on this page
Draft
1536 × 1024 (3:2)
YouTube
1280 × 720 (16:9)
Trim 80 px from the top and bottom of the draft, scale it to 1280 × 720, and keep your words clear of the bottom-right corner.

Generate a thumbnail draft

One landscape image per try

2/2 drafts left today

One 1536 by 1024 draft per try, two tries a day. Crop it to 1280 by 720 before you upload it to YouTube.

Generated thumbnail

Your thumbnail draft appears here

Describe the video or paste its script, then press Generate Thumbnail.

Before you generate

Three habits of AI image models to plan around

  • They often default to squares

    Many image tools start square. This designer asks for a 1536 by 1024 landscape image that crops cleanly to 16:9; with other tools, set the ratio up front or leave room to crop top and bottom.

  • They misspell words

    Lettering is still the weakest part of most image models. Ask for the picture without text, then add your three or four words in an editor where you control the spelling and the font.

  • They fill every corner

    Left alone, a model packs detail everywhere. Ask for one subject on one side and a plain area on the other, so your title has somewhere to sit.

Layouts

Four thumbnail formulas that need no face

  • The single object

    One thing, large and sharply lit, on a plain background: a cracked hourglass for a history mystery, a pill bottle for a health myth. It reads at any size because there is nothing else to look at.

  • Before and after

    Split the frame in two: the city in 1900 and today, the room before and after. The viewer’s eye compares the halves, and the comparison is the reason to click.

  • The circled detail

    A wide scene with one spot marked by an arrow or a circle. It works for explainers and mysteries, as long as the video actually explains the marked detail.

  • The scene from your video

    Reuse the strongest frame from the video itself, in the same art style, with a short line of text. Viewers who click get exactly the look they were promised.

The rules

YouTube's Thumbnail Rules in One Place

YouTube asks for 1280 by 720 pixels, a 16:9 ratio, a width of at least 640 pixels and a file under 2 MB, as a JPG, GIF or PNG. Custom thumbnails are only available once your account is verified, which in practice means confirming a phone number. In YouTube Studio on a computer, Test & Compare lets you upload up to three thumbnails for one video and picks a winner based on watch time.

Shorts work differently. The usual route is to choose a frame from the Short itself when you upload in the YouTube mobile app. That is why the first seconds matter twice. In the editor of the Blipix faceless video generator, the Thumbnail tab adds a Thumbnail Intro, an image shown at the start of the video, with or without a title over it, picked from your own frames or uploaded. It gives you a clean, readable frame to choose when you post.

Whatever the format, the thumbnail and the title are read together. Write the title first, then make the thumbnail add something it does not say. Our YouTube title length checker counts a title's characters against a 55-character guideline, a rough point where long titles start to be shortened in feeds.

Step by step

A Faceless Thumbnail in Five Passes

The order matters: decide the promise before the picture, and the picture before the lettering. This works with any image tool, this one included.

  1. Write the promise in four words

    What will the viewer get that the title does not already say? "He vanished in 1937" next to a title about an unsolved case. Four words at most, because anything longer shrinks to nothing on a phone.

  2. Choose one subject

    Pick the single object, place or moment that carries the promise. If you need two, use the before-and-after split. Three subjects is a collage, and collages lose to simple images in a busy feed.

  3. Generate the background at 16:9

    Describe the subject, the light and an empty area for text, with no lettering in the image. The models listed on our AI image generator page offer 16:9 directly, which saves you a crop.

  4. Add the words yourself

    Use a heavy font, a dark outline or a solid box behind light text, and keep it away from the bottom-right corner, where YouTube prints the video length.

  5. Shrink it and squint

    View the finished image at the width of a thumbnail in the mobile feed, roughly the size of a matchbox. If you cannot tell what it is in one second, remove something and look again.

Keep going

Related Tools

More Blipix tools that pair well with this one.

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FAQ8 answers

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers to the questions we hear most.

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OpenAI's gpt-image-1. Each try returns one 1536 by 1024 image, close to YouTube's 16:9, which you can download and crop to 1280 by 720. You get two tries a day, and the result is a first draft to refine with the five passes on this page, not a finished thumbnail.

YouTube recommends 1280 by 720 pixels at 16:9, at least 640 pixels wide, under 2 MB, saved as JPG, GIF or PNG. If an image tool gives you a square, crop it to 16:9 and check that the subject survives the crop.

Custom thumbnails require a verified account. In YouTube Studio, verify with a phone number and the option appears for your uploads. Accounts with past Community Guidelines strikes can lose access to the feature.

For Shorts, you usually pick a frame from the video in the YouTube mobile app instead of uploading a separate image, so the frame needs to read well on its own. Our guide to making YouTube Shorts covers the upload steps.

Usually, a few words, because text has to do the job a face would do elsewhere: create a question. Keep it to three or four words that add to the title rather than repeat it, and set them yourself, since AI images often misspell lettering.

Yes. YouTube Studio's Test & Compare feature, on desktop, takes up to three thumbnails for one long-form video and chooses the winner by share of watch time. Give a test a few days before you read anything into it.

Yes, as long as they are not misleading. YouTube's spam and deceptive practices policy covers thumbnails that misrepresent what the video contains. Also avoid real people's faces and brand logos you have no rights to use.

The same one as the video, so the click lands where the viewer expected. If your videos use a moody, filmic look such as the Cinematic style, keep the thumbnail in that look and let the text supply the color.

Good thumbnail, now the video

Make the faceless video behind it in Blipix, in the same art style, then add a Thumbnail Intro from your best frame.

Try Blipix
  1. Script
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  3. Visuals
  4. Captions