Hey, guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer.
And just like we do every Wednesday,
it's time for some YouTube tips, ideas, suggestions, and advice.
What we're going to do today is feature one
of you guys from the video creators community.
I love it when we get to do this.
Today, JJ Johnson from the Reality Survival YouTube
channel is going to show you how to make a YouTube
thumbnail that's properly sized and ready for the site,
using only online free tools.
That's coming up.
OK, so the first thing that you're going to want to do
is go to ipiccy.com.
And that is www.
I-P-I-C-C-Y .com.
Hit Enter.
And then hit Start Editing.
OK, it's going to pull you up.
And what you're going to need to do first
is you're going to need to create a template.
So what I do is go here and Create New Image.
Now, you want the image to be 1280 by 720.
1280 by 720.
That's the right size for YouTube
so that it's going to fit appropriately in the space
that they give you.
OK, now I'm just going to go ahead and give it a background
color.
I'm going to use black for mine.
You can obviously pick whatever you want.
Go up here and get a shape.
I'm just going to get a rectangle.
Let's see.
Yep, that's good.
Now I'm going to size this out just a little bit
past the border.
That way I know it's all filled in.
Good.
And then I will color it black just like that.
OK, so now what I want to do is I
can go ahead and put in any text or anything like that
that I want to be on the template.
So this would be the text that will
be on every single one of your thumbnails.
So mine's just going to be Reality and Survival.
I'm going to stretch that out, with a color.
And we'll make it about that big.
And really this is-- this is where there's
going to be a custom aspect of it for you.
I'll change the font, make it something
a little bit cooler and a little bit more noticeable.
Now, I'm kind of doing this on the rush here,
so if it's not perfect, then forgive me.
All right, now I'll give it a second-- second word.
It's going to go vertical along the left side.
It'll be Survival.
Give it another color.
We'll throw it up here and stretch this out as well.
So once you get this all finished up-- change
to the same font.
Make it about the same size.
OK, good.
Now, if I wanted to import a little logo or something
like that into the corner, I could do that as well.
All I've got to do is just go here.
And this is one that I've already kind of pre-loaded
up just to save a little bit of time.
We'll size that down.
Kind of throw that in there, just help with the branding
and that kind of thing a little bit.
And that's pretty much our template.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to hit the check
mark over here, say that's good.
I'm going to save it.
And let's call that Test 2.
And let's save it to our computer on our desktop,
and that'll be good.
Now what you want to do is you can close that photo.
You can come in here and you can go to Upload Photo.
And you want to just go ahead and upload the test
that you just made.
And click Open.
Now you can see that you've got it right here.
So now whenever you do a video and you're
ready to make your thumbnail afterwards,
then all you've got to do is come to iPiccy,
and you'll have these uploads in here
that you've done previously.
So this will be the start of how to make each thumbnail
after your template's done.
So we can go ahead and open this up.
So now what we're going to do is click Layer.
And we'll go to Layers.
And we're going to add a picture.
So for the picture, what we're going to need to do
is upload a screenshot.
All right?
So we're going to add a photo to it.
And this is a screen shot that I pulled from a video
on my channel.
Let's see if we can get that going.
Oops, sorry about that.
All right, and hit Upload Photos right here.
Now, this is a screenshot that I had already ready to go.
There we go.
And we'll open that up.
And now we can see that we've got that thumbnail up here.
So I'm going to pull that into my space right
here and resize it.
And that's going to be good.
Now I'm going to add a little bit of text to it.
How to build an evasion shelter.
All right.
Now if I want to center that up, I
can just go ahead and hit Center right there.
We'll change the color to make it stand out a little bit
better and change the font to the same font
as the other stuff.
And then we'll go ahead and stretch this out.
All right, there we go.
So that looks pretty good.
Now I'm going to go ahead and save it.
Combine the layers.
Call it Evasion Shelter.
And we will save that.
OK, so we've got that saved to the desktop.
Now what I want to do is, if I'm ready to upload on my channel,
I'll go to the video that I was going
to need the thumbnail for.
And I will just click on Custom Thumbnail.
I'll go to my desktop.
And I will find the thumbnail.
Here it is.
And I'll click it.
And then it will upload it.
And as you can see, it's perfectly sized
so that it fits in the window correctly.
And it should be all good to go.
That is just how I make the thumbnails for my videos.
A couple things to remember is you need a correct size,
so that 1280 by 720.
Then you also want to try to have something that stands out.
So, you know, the colors that you use need to be bright.
You need to try to incorporate the branding for your channel.
And then go ahead and put something
that is related to the title and the description
and the content of the video as well on the thumbnail.
So if you do all those things, you
should have a good, successful thumbnail.
You'll have a template to make it really quick and easy.
All you've got to do is get a screenshot from the video
that you want, slap it right into your thumbnail,
add a little bit of text, and you're good to go.