Check out this easy to use YouTube thumbnail maker. It allows you to create great looking thumbnails in just a couple of minutes. While it’s designed to create images for YouTube, you could even use this as a Twitch Offline Image maker as well!

Launch Thumbnail Generator

I want to give a quick shout out to Orels1, a member of the Nerd or Die Discord. Orels created this app and allowed me to share it with everyone.

Using the YouTube Thumbnail Maker App

This post will serve as a walk through for the app, you can launch the full app by clicking here. First, we need to either drag and drop an image into the app, or you can even click inside the box and select an image like normal. Select an image you’d like to use for your background and we’ll see it be loaded in. I recommend using an image that is 1920 x 1080 pixels to start with, or one that is 16 by 9 in aspect ratio, such as 1280 x 720 pixels. If you use a different aspect ratio the thumbnail maker will automatically adjust and scale the image to fit the recommended size for YouTube thumbnails.


YouTube Thumbnail Maker App

When we scroll down we’ll see a preview of image on the left and if you hold the F key on your keyboard, the thumbnail will scale up to fit the screen to give us a better idea of how everything is looking.

Background Image Options

The first option sets in the Youtube Thumbnail Maker will be for your background. The overlay opacity will control how much of the color we selected in the overlay color option shows through. Think of this like a color tint that you can apply to your background image. This can be useful when you want your text to stand out a bit more. You can use the color picker to change the color in multiple ways. You can even see the hex code or RGB values of the color here as well.

Next, is the vignette. Think of this as a gradient that comes in from the corners. Adjust the opacity and size of your vignette can produce some very nice looking effects. Remember, you can scroll back up to get a better look at how your thumbnail is turning out.

Background and Frame Options

Frame Options

Let’s move onto the frame options for our Youtube Thumbnail Maker. Here, we can set a frame size, or thickness, for a frame. We can adjust the frame padding, or distance from edge of the border of our image, and we can select a color for our frame as well.

Title Options

Now we can add in some text options. Both the title options and subtitle options sections work in the same way. Let’s start by adding in some text for our title and adjusting the font size a bit as needed.

You’ll notice some alignment buttons on each side of where you can input your text. We can left, middle, or right align our text as needed. The other set of buttons allow us to adjust the text to be vertically aligned in the top, middle, and bottom of the image. If you want a bit more of precise control over the positioning of these text titles, you can also use the horizontal and vertical shift sliders to better position your thumbnails.

Title Options

A future option we’ll consider adding in is font style selections. These will allow you to customize your thumbnails even further. Make sure to let us know any recommendations you’d like to see added by commenting below. Finally, there’s color selections for both the title and subtitle options.When you have the perfect title positions, sizes, and colors, we can add in a branding image.

Adding in a Branding Image

This works in the same way as adding in our background image, where we can simply drop an image into the app, or click inside the box and select our image. If you don’t want to use a branding image, then you can of course skip this step.

We can set what side of the image we’d like to align our branding image to. Let’s say we wan to align our image to the bottom right, we can simply click the right button, and then the bottom button. We can adjust the offsets of the horizontal and vertical positions as well. This will allow us to make sure our branding image is exactly where we’d like it.

Branding and Saving YouTube Thumbnail

We can adjust the opacity of this image, if we’d like to give it a watermark effect, as well as the overall scale of the image, to make it bigger or smaller. Let’s hold the F key to pay some respects and see how the image looks so far.

When you’re all done, simply hit save result. The image will be downloaded onto your computer.