YouTube’s giving Shorts creators more options to customize their thumbnails, with the capacity to edit your Shorts thumbnail frame post upload, by adding text and filters to the image.
As you can see in this example, now, you’ll be able to choose a frame for your Shorts thumbnail, then add text and filters to change the look of that image. You can’t upload custom Shorts thumbnails as yet, but this provides more ways to customize your Shorts presentation.
So why can’t you just add wholly custom Shorts thumbnails, like you can with regular YouTube clips?
Well, in YouTube’s view, you don’t really need to.
While Shorts thumbnail editing has been a much-requested feature, YouTube says that Shorts thumbnails are not as important as regular video thumbnail images, because most users come across Shorts clips within the Shorts feed, i.e. they’re scrolling through the full-screen video display, as opposed to tapping on a smaller thumbnail to activate a Shorts clip.
That said, there are other ways for users to find your Shorts, and YouTube’s also trying to cater to this.
As per YouTube:
“As a reminder Shorts thumbnails will only show on search hashtag and audio pivot pages and on your channel. We’re exploring bringing additional functionality to shorts thumbnails next year.”
So custom Shorts thumbnails could still be on the horizon, but for the time being, YouTube’s looking to build a lower spec variation, via thumb frame editing, as it assesses whether it really needs to add custom thumbnail uploads for Shorts as well.
So for now, you can only add text, filters and emojis to your Shorts thumb frames, but soon, you may have more editing and customization capacity.
Maybe.
Till then, you’ll have to settle for this.
You can learn more about how to use YouTube’s new thumbnail editing options for Shorts here.
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