Custom thumbnail

Upload a still of your own and it becomes the image the video wears everywhere it appears: search, home, suggested, your channel page and the preview when someone shares the link. The alternative is one of three frames YouTube grabs automatically from the file, which rarely says anything useful. The working size is 1280 by 720 pixels at 16:9. YouTube has raised the thumbnail file ceiling from 2MB to roughly 50MB and now renders higher-resolution versions for TV screens, so crushing an image down to hit an old size limit is wasted effort.