6 Best Tools to Create Custom YouTube Thumbnails

Combine photos, shapes and fonts to create the best YouTube design

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Key notes

  • If you're a singer, vlogger, or just someone who owns their Youtube channel, it's paramount to also own a good thumbnail maker software for PC.
  • A creative thumbnail automatically captures attention. But there is more to it than coming up with a great concept.
  • You also need a tool that will combine everything together in a visually appealing way so as to strengthen your authority among your followers.
  • A Youtube thumbnail maker provides you with the means to combine photos, shapes, text, and fonts in a way that attracts a great audience.
youtube intro software windows 10

YouTube is the ultimate platform where you can upload your own clips. Every YouTube video includes a thumbnail image that is either a snapshot from the video or an original picture that isn’t captured from the clip.

YouTube restricts users from selecting a thumbnail from three automatically generated video images.

However, users with verified accounts can add their own custom thumbnails to videos with JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP images that match the required 1,280 x 720 resolution.

There are numerous web apps that provide image thumbnails specifically tailored for YouTube videos that you can edit as required.

Alternatively, you can utilize thumbnail maker software for PC to capture images from within videos to include as YouTube thumbnails.

These are a few handy web apps and thumbnail creators for PC tools that you can use to set up a YouTube video with thumbnail images.

What is the best thumbnail maker for PC?

Adobe Creative Cloud Express – Wide variety of fonts

Adobe Creative Cloud Express is a graphics design web tool with which you can design menus, presentations, flyers, newsletters, brochures, cards, posters, invitations, and, of course, YouTube thumbnails.

There are no additional fees for any of the app’s pre-made template images, but the thumbnails do include a Creative Cloud Express logo. You can remove the logo by upgrading to a premium account.

Adobe Creative Cloud Express provides some great typography options for Youtube thumbnail images as users can select a wide variety of fonts (and upload them), add shapes to text, add text effects, select alternative color schemes and customize the text styles.

You can therefore create customized thumbnails for your YouTube qualitative videos and use different icons or other design assets included in the editor.

The users can also add their own photos, logos, and a multitude of icons (otherwise stickers) to the thumbnails.

This being said, you should employ this Adobe solution to create suggestive thumbnail images for your YouTube videos in just a few simple steps.

Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Looking for the best app to set up stunning YouTube thumbnails? There is no match for this mighty, yet lightweight tool.
Check price Visit Website

Canva – Background remover

Canva is among the best web apps to set up a custom YouTube video thumbnail image.

There isn’t a subscription fee for the web tool, but there are charges for its optional stock photos and clip art.

Canva’s stock library includes more than one million graphics, illustrations, and photos for Youtube thumbnails.

Plus, the users can choose from more than 130 fonts and customize the images’ text boxes and text colors.

Another great thing about Canva is that you can upload your own images with which to set up Youtube thumbnails.

In addition, this free designing tool is meant for every single person that needs creative tools for personalized video thumbnails or presentation banners.

You also have premium features that can be of much help, such as brand kits, magic resize options, or background remover.

Canva

Try this easy-to-use tool to get a vast library of illustrations and unique designs.
Free trial Visit Website

Fotor – Pre-made layouts

Fotor collage

Fotor is a web app and Windows desktop software that includes a variety of YouTube thumbnail templates with various themes, such as cooking, games, travel, sports, music, Christmas, seasons, etc.

Fotor users can edit the background color and text of all the themes and add a plethora of stickers to them. Or you can set up your own thumbnail image from scratch.

This page includes the Fotor templates, which you can open and edit without an account. You can edit anything on the official website directly.

More so, using the Fotor platform is entirely suited to creating expressive thumbnails with practical tools like text combinations, lots of photos, diverse backgrounds, and more.

It is possible as well to customize your project using multiple elements. You have illustrations, shapes, or icons to add to your video thumbnails.

In this way, you ensure the quality of your YouTube videos due to eye-catching thumbnails meant to convince even the most selective viewers.

It’s also possible to create custom thumbnails designed for your YouTube videos in a very short time. You can browse many templates based on categories to get more inspiration.

Otherwise, just select the thumbnail format and start it from scratch with various graphic tools or visual elements.

Fotor

With this clever tool, you may access millions of pre-made layouts for eye-catching YouTube thumbnails.

Thumbnail me – Simple interface

If you need to capture a snapshot from a video for its YouTube thumbnail, Thumbnail me is worth noting. Thumbnail me is freeware software that you can run on Windows platforms from XP to 10.

The software enables users to capture one thumbnail image or a group of images from a video for a grid of pictures.

When you’ve opened a video to capture images from in Thumbnail me, you can configure the number of rows and columns for the thumbnail to include.

To include just one video image in the thumbnail, adjust the row and column values to 1.

You can select an exact time to capture an image from the video with the software’s timeline.

Thumbnail me users can select alternative output formats and background colors for the video. You can also add additional title text to images.

In addition, this open-source thumbnail creator is highly capable to transform your favorite media into thumbnails, ready to be used.

The tool is continuously developed by contributors and it was tested on different Windows platforms like Windows 7 and later versions.

Get Thumbnail me

Video Thumbnail Maker – Two functionalities

Video Thumbnail Maker is similar to Thumbnail me. The software enables you to capture a single image thumbnail or a whole grid of images from a selected video.

VTM has silver, gold, and platinum versions available on the publisher’s website. However, the unregistered version adds watermarks to the thumbnail images.

Video Thumbnail Maker includes more extensive options for setting up video thumbnails than Thumbnail me.

Users can select to set up a Simple Matrix or Special Matrix, with one expanded image set alongside smaller ones, and customize the technical details, tile effects, and backgrounds of the thumbnails.

Alternatively, you can configure a matrix to include just one image from a video. VTM supports most video formats, and you can also batch-process multiple video files.

This valuable thumbnail tool can help you create the most impressive thumbnails for YouTube videos.

It offers you the chance to create various thumbnails that can be used for home-video catalogs or for network video sharing.

This software contains two main functionalities that will surely help you. You have the thumbnail maker and thumbnail viewer with the ability to start video files right from the thumbnail sheet.

Get Video Thumbnail Maker

AMT – Auto-Movie-Thumbnailer – Multiple formats supporter

AMT – Auto-Movie-Thumbnail is another software that you can use to extract image thumbnails from videos.

The AMT software can also come in handy for grabbing snapshots from videos for YouTube thumbnails.

It is freeware software that you can utilize to extract multiple or single images from a selected video.

The software’s Layout tab provides numerous settings with which to customize the thumbnail’s color and design, the number of images included within the thumbnail, and its timestamp.

The tool can do much more, and help you create convincing thumbnails for your YouTube channel. Plus, it’s multifunctional and can support you with different movie formats and customized screen captures.

The known fault of this software is that short movies might not contain enough keyframes, thus you can’t create more thumbnails than the keyframes of the specific movie.

Users can also add custom text, info headers, and logos to the thumbnails with the software.

Plus, this automated GUI can help you batch screencaps or index thumbnail pictures. It supports many different input formats, basically any format supported by Media Player.

Using this tool offers you to chance to customize the design or layout of your screen captures in order to create eye-catching thumbnails.

Get AMT

In conclusion, we created this guide on the best YouTube thumbnail tools for you in order to have valuable resources to create impressive video thumbnails.

Do not hesitate to share your experience with any of the software in the comments section below.

More about the topics: YouTube