What is a Google drive?
“Google drive is a self-hosted cloud-based site that provides free space to store your files and pictures to share them with your friends and family”.
Google Drive is also used to promote businesses or websites. You can upload a video to Google Drive and embed the file in your blog or any other website.
What is a Thumbnail?
“A Thumbnail is a still image that acts as
a preview image of your video.”
A thumbnail is the first thing seen by the viewers while watching videos. It is the only thing that forces the viewer either to watch the video or not because it previews the video content. It is also shown in the search results. A thumbnail is just like the cover or title of a book. You will read a book by its cover. In the same way, a video is viewed by its thumbnail.
Google drive is also used for the promotion of websites and businesses. It does not offer to add a thumbnail or cover image like YouTube has the option to set and can change the thumbnail of the video. As we all know Google drive is not a streaming platform and has its own boundaries.
Normally, the google drive can generate a thumbnail from the video and uses the generated thumbnail ignoring the one you have uploaded. But on the other hand, if it cannot generate a thumbnail the uploaded thumbnail will be displayed. Usually, the default thumbnail may have weird facial expressions or may not be attractive for the viewers to open the video.
Here we are discussing a few alternatives to change the thumbnail of the video in Google drive.
Select a separate image to be housed in a separate column to set as a thumbnail image and then go into the details, title, and Image settings.
How to Add Thumbnails to the Video Using Wonder Share Filmora 11
Wonder Share Filmora 11 is an all-in-one video editing platform that provides powerful, creative, and simple interphase to edit videos and images in a few clicks. It has a ton of amazing features that make your videos, images, and audio stands out. You can edit your videos and images in a great cinematic form using its effects, transitions, overlays, text, and a lot more. Do not wait, go and download Filmora 11 and there are more tools for you to discover.
I am going to show you how to create a thumbnail of the video in Filmora11.
Let us get started!
- Open Wonder Share Filmora 11 and click on New Project.
- Drag the image of your choice into the timeline.
- Drag the image of your choice into the timeline.
- Click on the AI-Portrait option from the Effects
- Drag the Human Segmentation effect over the clip into the timeline.
Now you see that the subject of the video thumbnail is selected and the background has been removed.
The AI-Portrait is a very useful effect, it allows you to quickly remove the background through artificial intelligence.
Now you can see the subject has been selected and the background has been removed.
- Now Scale up the photo to be visible on the screen.
- You can set the border settings here to make it more smooth and attractive.
I have dragged my image to the left as I want my text to the right side.
- Let’s drag the desired background into the timeline. ( I got this background from Pexel.com)
- Click on sample colors under the media option to add the gradient overlay.
- Drag your favorite Gradient and drop it below the background layer.
- Now select the Overlay option under the Effects tab and then Hit Frames.
- Add your desired frame between a photo layer and a background layer to show depth in your thumbnail.
So, I choose cinema 21.9 frames to add two black bars behind our subject.
Let’s choose your desired Title from the Library. Here are tons of title packs, you can choose from.
- Select the Titles option under the Titles tab then select your desired Title.
- Drag and locate the title in the place of your taste and then write the text you want.
- Adjust your text accordingly, you can change the font size, color, style, and much more
- Now simply click the snapshot button below the preview screen and the snapshot will be saved in default directory and automatically imported to the medium room.
- Right-click on the snapshot in the media pool and click on Reveal in explorer.
- Your thumbnail will be saved in the folder, you can upload it on the Google drive.
Unfortunately, there is no way to change the thumbnail of the video on Google drive. But we can take help from other websites to customize the thumbnail image and then upload it to Google drive. Let us discuss a few free websites used for the thumbnail of a video on Google drive.
Here are the best possible ways to change the thumbnail of the video stored in the Google drive.
1. Change the Thumbnails of Google drive using the Wix.
The Wix editor is a platform that is used to edit and make your own website. It provides easy interphase to customize the site using its amazing features. There are hundreds of features to build your own site or image by adding customizing elements and choosing color and text theme.
You can use the Wix to set or change your thumbnail to make your video attractive and eye-catching. The cover image can be by uploading and a frame can be selected from the video.
Let’s get started!
- Open the Wix editor from the browser.
- Select a video from your video library.
- Hit the Edit icon at the video
- Click on change cover under the cover image.
- Select the desired frame from the list, or you can upload your own by clicking the “+”
- Click on the Set as Cover
- Now upload the video on Google drive.
- If the file fails to upload, clear your cache and cookies and check your internet connection.
2. Change the Thumbnails of Google drive using Canvas.
Canvas is an online graphic design platform that allows and provides you with user-friendly interphase to make eye-catching logos, thumbnails, posters, and a ton of other visual content. You need not download any application and moreover, it is free to use. It saves your previous tasks and has hundreds of frames, and designs to select according to your taste or you can make your own design by editing.
So let’s start!
- Select a template of your choice from the library.
- Canvas provides you with more than 2 million images in the library but you can also upload your own image for Thumbnail.
- Click on the placeholder text to write your own text.
- You can change your image fonts, color, size, and
- You can easily customize your video thumbnail and upload it on Google drive.
- Download the video thumbnail.
- Now upload the Thumbnail on Google Drive.
3. Change the Thumbnails of Google drive using VLC Media Player.
VLC Media Player is a free and open-source media player that plays wide range of media files like images, video files as well as audio and DVDs. It is 100% free software and safe from viruses.
Here are the steps used to change the cover photo of your video using the VLC Media Player.
Let’s dive in…
- Go to the tools and select information from the drop-down list.
- The Current Media Information tab will be shown.
- There will be a picture or VLC icon at the bottom-right corner.
- Right-click on that picture or icon and select the download cover art or add cover art from file.
- Download cover art; if you want to add pictures from the album from the internet.
- Add cover art from file; if you want to put your own thumbnail image and browse from the storage.
The information will be saved automatically and the thumbnail will be changed when you open the file.
Important points.
You can use any other video editor to change the thumbnail of the video but keep a few points in mind.
- Thumbnails should be added at the start of the video.
- The Thumbnail should be a few seconds long so that google drive considers it as a cover image.
- It works for short videos but it can be applied for long videos.
- Use a high-quality HD image for the thumbnail so that Google Drive can accept it as valuable for the thumbnail image.
- Thumbnails should be uploaded in PNG, GIF, or JPG
- The image ratio should be 16:9 and resolution of 1920x1080 pixels for PNG and JPG and 960x480 pixels for GIFs.
- The maximum file size should be
- The minimum width should be 220 pixels.
Even after keeping an eye on these important points, google drive sometimes does not show the thumbnail as a cover photo.
Conclusion.
In the above article, I have discussed a couple of different ways to add a thumbnail of the video and upload it on Google drive. I personally recommend Wonder Share Filmora 11 to make and change thumbnail image of the video as it is a very powerful as well as simple tool.