ThumbnailCreator

You can make the best YouTube videos in the world. If your thumbnail is bad, no one will click them and they will not get any views. But creating a good YouTube thumbnail is difficult. You need design skills or you need to pay someone with design skills. You need to understand best practices like lighting, facial expressions, and image composition. And then you have to spend hours preparing the scene, making photos, and putting it all together. But today we have AI that can do that for us. And what used to take hours or even days can now literally be done in one minute. So today I'm going to show you a tool that creates viral YouTube thumbnails with your own face on them from a single prompt and they are as good as MrBeast thumbnails or you can use it to improve existing thumbnails with best practices. I will walk you through everything step by step and show you how to use the tool. And at the end, we will compare it with a free alternative, Google AI Studio, and see which one creates better results. My name is Florian Walther and this is the AI tool corner where I review the latest AI software to find out which ones can actually improve our lives and businesses. You can find the tool at thumbnailcreator.com. I will also put this link into the video description below. They have a 7-day free trial, but the pricing is also very generous because you get 500 generations each month for 29 bucks. Now, compare this to what you would usually pay for a thumbnail designer or the time you would invest to create that many thumbnails. If you hire a designer, you usually pay somewhere between 20 and 100 bucks for a single thumbnail, depending on the skill level. So, this is much cheaper, but is it actually good? Let's find out together.

Let's click on login to create an account. And in the dashboard, we can find a bunch of different tools. I will walk you through the most important ones. The first step is to set up our face. Here, we can upload a few photos of our face and the AI can then put this face on any thumbnail with any expression and we never have to make a photo of ourselves ever again. You only have to do this once and then you can use this over and over again. So, we click on new face. We give this a name. I've already done this earlier, but let's set it up a second time. A trigger word, which is basically a tag for our face. And then we have to upload 10 to 20 images of our face from different directions and different facial expressions. But again, you only have to do this once. So sit down, make a bunch of nice photos of your face, upload them here, and then you never have to worry about this again. Now, I think it's a good idea to remove the background of your photos because this creates better results. There's a free tool that can do this for you, the Adobe background remover. I will put a link to this into the video description below. Just upload your photo here, remove the background, and then upload them to thumbnailcreator.com and click on create face. And then we wait until this has finished. Of course, you can also train the face of someone else. Just make sure that you have the appropriate rights to use this person's face. Now this says pending and this takes a few more minutes and then it will switch to active and then we can start using this face on our thumbnails.

Okay, now let's get to the exciting part creating a thumbnail and the most straightforward way is to use this AI thumbnail generator which generates a thumbnail from a prompt. I've already prepared a prompt. I ate the world's largest ice cream cone. Now the cool thing about this tool is that you don't have to prompt engineer. You don't have to write an elaborate prompt with all the best practices and exactly how the thumbnail should look. This is what the tool does for you. You just have to enter a basic video concept and the tool will use AI to enhance your prompt with best practices so that we actually get a good result. Now, you can be more detailed in here if you want. You could write where exactly it should put the text and everything, but you don't have to. So, we will keep the prompt simple. I ate the world's largest ice cream cone. And then we have to select our face model which is Florian, the one we just set up. How many thumbnails we want to generate? Let's generate three. This is what I was talking about. The first step is to enhance the prompt with best practices and then it generates the thumbnail itself. So let's see how good the results look. If you're not happy with the results, you can click on generate more variations. And sometimes the text is in a bad position. Like here it's hiding my face. A little tip, you can actually go to the home tab and here you will find the thumbnails without text because I think this one here for example looks better and more intriguing without the text. So we could pick this one and combine it with a good video title. But I personally like this one that says it broke me because it's a funny title that makes me want to click the video. Now we can either download this right away or we can click on open in editor where we can make more customizations using AI.

Now we are in this editor tab which is the most versatile tool of thumbnail creator. Here we can for example give the AI instructions for changes to make. Let's give this a try. I tell it to put a giant ferris wheel in the background. And voila, the thumbnail is still exactly the same. But now we have this ferris wheel in the background. Isn't this cool? But actually I think it's too distracting. So here in the version history we can go back to the previous version. Another cool feature is multi-image editing, which we can find down here in the advanced tools. For example, let's say I want to upload this image of this head, this one here. And I want to tell the AI to put this head on my head. Okay, this does not look good. Let's try this again. Let's see if a different prompt works better. Make me wear the hat in the attached image. Okay, it's a little bit bigger now, but this doesn't look good. But I like the original thumbnail, the one we got from our first prompt. All these AI image models are still struggling a bit with different instructions. This is common between all of them, but of course they will keep getting better in the future. It won't take long before these AIs do exactly what we want.

Now, another cool little feature is that we can generate video title ideas for this thumbnail. Again, this uses YouTube best practices. You can give this a try. Another really cool feature is auto optimize, which applies all kinds of best practices to our thumbnail automatically. And we don't have to enter any instructions. And this looks really good. The colors are more vibrant. Obviously, we have this white line around us. And I think this one looks really great. But autooptimize is also useful for existing thumbnails that you already have and want to improve. So here in the thumbnails tab, we have this thumbnail extractor tool where we can paste a video link. Let's say I want to improve this thumbnail down here that I made a few months ago. I can just copy the link of this video, paste it here. It will extract the thumbnail. And then we can send this to the editor right away. And then again, auto optimize. And let's see what this does. Yeah. And this is the result. So, it added some arrows. It gave me this surprised facial expression. And again, it added a border. And it made everything a bit more glowy and prominent. You can also try this multiple times and the results will always be slightly different because this is AI and I like this one even more. Now this third version here is in the way. We could remove this with AI. But let me know in the comments below which one of these do you like more? The one I made myself the natural one, the first AI edit or the second AI edit. But this is what I like about AI. I didn't have to make a photo with this facial expression. It created this automatically from the existing photos because I really hate having to make all these photos with different expressions all the time. But we don't have to anymore because AI can do this for us.

Now, of course, instead of uploading your own thumbnails, you can also use thumbnails from other people in the industry as inspiration. So, here we have this style inspiration tab and here we can insert a keyword. For example, AI. Let's take one of these thumbnails and remix it because this is also a lot of fun. Let's take this one here. Let's tell it to change the text to make banger thumbnails. So, it changed the text. This is not perfect yet, but let's send this to our editor. The first thing we can do here is swap the face for our own one. Apply face swap. So, now it has my face. And I have to say this actually looks like me. Often AI kind of messes up my face, but this actually looks like me in the mirror. Now, it messed up the aspect ratio a little bit. We have this black border here at the top. Let's see if auto optimize can fix this. Yeah, again it improved the colors. It added this border and a shadow below the text and this arrow which I really like. So I think this one is really much better than the first version. The only thing that bothers me is this black border at the top. Let's see if we can get rid of this. Remove the black border at the top and make the text yellow and bigger. And it worked. The only thing that bothers me is that with each iteration we lose a little bit of image quality. Can you see it? My skin is starting to look weird because the colors are a little bit off. And this happens with each iteration. Again, this is a weakness of these AI image models. I'm sure they will improve this in the future. Sometimes you just have to try multiple times. Now, instead of auto optimize, we can also do more specific style changes. For example, we can only make the face more expressive or we can only make the colors more vibrant or use one of these different filters here like '90s cartoon. You can play around with this and when you like the result, you can click on download current and download your thumbnail.

Now, what doesn't work at all at the moment is this inpainting tool. So, the theory is that we can like select an area and only edit this part of the image. For example, I could tell the AI, put a microphone in my hand. But from my experience, this always looks off. Let's try it out. Well, it's not that bad actually, but the way I hold the microphone is just a little bit off. Again, I'm sure this will improve in the future. I will show you a free alternative in a moment. But first, let's take a look at some other tools we have available. For example, we have this trending tab where you can remix trending thumbnails. You can also filter this by category and then remix one of them and put your own face on it and apply best practices. There are also different thumbnails available. Again, you can use them to remix your own thumbnail. Actually, let's give this a quick try. Let's modify this one. Change the text to Australia and replace the tiger with a koala bear. I have no idea if this will work actually. That's pretty good. Yeah, this looks crisp. You can organize your thumbnails into different collections and there are a bunch of other AI thumbnail tools. You can try them out, but you will spend most of your time in the editor.

Now, a free alternative is Google AI Studio, which at the time of making this video uses the nano banana image model, which is pretty good. And this is probably also what the AI thumbnail generator uses under the hood, but I'm not sure. Let's try to recreate our original ice cream cone thumbnail. Here, we have to be a bit more specific in the prompt because this tool doesn't automatically enhance your prompt with thumbnail best practices. So, I told it to create a YouTube thumbnail for a video called I ate the world's largest ice cream cone. Use YouTube thumbnail industry best practices and the person from the attached images. Now, the result is not bad, but this doesn't use best practices because the thumbnail generator here is trained on YouTube best practices. Just looks a bit better, doesn't it? And AI Studio used one of the original images that I uploaded, this one here. It didn't use my face to generate a new expression. It used the existing one exactly as it is. And one more downside is that we have this watermark here in the bottom right corner. Of course, we can remove this, but I think the result is not as good as thumbnailcreator.com. But if you think 30 bucks a month for 500 generations is too expensive, then this is a free alternative. I will put a link to this tool into the video description. They have a 7-day free trial. Just try it out yourself. Subscribe to the channel for more AI tool reviews in the future. And then we'll see you in the next video. Take care.