Thumbnail Studio lives at Thumbnails in your channel navigation. It is a board where you type a video title, get real thumbnails back, and keep editing until one is right. This guide walks you through the first one, start to finish.
Your first visit creates the channel's board. A walkthrough video opens in the corner so you can watch the same steps while you click around; dismiss it and a Tutorial chip stays if you want it back.
Make Your First Thumbnail
Click New thumbnail in the toolbar. One panel does all the making, and nothing spends a credit until you click Generate.
The panel asks for:
- Video title — the title of the video this thumbnail is for. This is the only required field.
- Directions (optional) — what you want in the picture, in plain language. "Me on the left, a burning laptop on the right." "Keep it dark and cinematic." "No arrows."
- Start from — where the design takes after. The four choices are below.
- People — who appears in the thumbnail. See People.
- Variations — how many thumbnails this run makes. Each one costs one thumbnail credit, and the button shows the total before you click it.
- Headline text — choose Baked into image (the default) to have the AI draw the words into the picture, or Editable text to change the wording and font after generating.
Placeholder tiles appear straight away and fill in as each render finishes, usually in 10–60 seconds. If a render fails, the tile says so and the credit returns to your balance.
Where the Design Takes After
Start from is the one choice that changes the results most.
Brainstorm
Brainstorm gives you finished thumbnails for the same title, ready to edit and download. Each variation takes after a different format — proven layouts that work on YouTube — so you get genuinely different ideas rather than one idea re-rolled.
Most formats come from the viral formats gallery. If your channel has at least three of its own thumbnails and a detected dominant format, up to half the tiles instead remix that proven format of your own; the rest still come from the gallery.
These are real thumbnails, not sketches: full-size images you can edit, merge, and publish. Each costs one credit, the same as every other generation. Every tile is labelled Brainstorm: {format} so you can see which format it took after, whether that format came from the gallery or from your own channel.
Start here when you do not know what the thumbnail should be yet. This is the default when you open New thumbnail with no images selected.
If the viral formats gallery is temporarily empty, Studio says so: "Brainstorm needs the viral formats gallery, which is empty right now. Start from your channel or another channel instead."
My channel
This remixes your own proven thumbnails. Studio finds the videos whose titles sit closest to your new title, keeps what makes those thumbnails work — layout, colours, lighting, badges — and swaps what belonged to the old video. The result sits naturally beside your existing catalogue. Each tile shows which video it took after.
If the channel has nothing to remix yet — a new channel, or a planning space — Studio borrows from your tracked competitors, or from channels in your niche, and tells you where the design came from.
Another channel
Enter a YouTube handle and Studio remixes that channel's layouts instead of yours. Use it when a creator you admire has a format you want to try. Studio remembers the handle for next time.
If the channel is new to Subscribr, the first run fetches its videos before it can remix them. Keep the panel open and Studio continues when they are ready. If you change your choices, click Generate again to use them; closing the panel stops automatic generation.
Selected thumbnails
Select between one and six finished images on the board first, then choose this. Those images become the references, and Directions is where you say how to combine them: "Same layout as the first one, but the subject from the second." "Match these colours."
Any image on the board works as a reference, including a competitor's thumbnail you imported and one Studio generated for you. There is a shortcut too: select a single finished tile and click Use as starting point, and the panel opens with that tile already chosen.
People
People is where you say who is in the thumbnail. It lists the faces saved for this channel, grouped one chip per person — two photos named "Sam" are Sam from two angles, not two people.
- Your channel's default person is on by default, so a remix keeps featuring you without your having to remember.
- Turn a person off for a video they are not in, or add a second person for a collaboration.
- You can put up to three people in one thumbnail, using up to four photos in total.
Click Add person under People, enter their name, and Upload photos. The photos are saved and selected without closing your draft. Add different angles of the same person together, up to four photos per person.
Use Edit people to rename someone, add more photos, or Use by default on this channel. Renaming updates all of that person's photos. These controls are also available in Edit with AI. You can still mark an existing library image with This is a face, and remove old photos from Images.
If your channel presents on camera and no face is saved yet, Studio says so before it generates, rather than quietly putting a stranger in your thumbnail.
Put References on the Board
You do not have to start from a blank board. Add references in the toolbar puts real, published thumbnails in front of you:
- Viral formats gallery — proven thumbnail formats: layouts, composition patterns, and visual approaches that perform on YouTube.
- My channel — your recent uploads, most-viewed videos, or top outliers (the videos that beat your own baseline, usually your best design references).
- My competitors — the same curated list your Competitors page tracks, pooled and ranked so the frame shows what is working in your niche right now.
- Another channel — search any YouTube handle and import its recent, most-viewed, or outlier thumbnails.
- A YouTube video URL — paste a link. A video link imports that exact thumbnail; a channel link opens the channel importer.
You can also drag image files straight onto the board, or paste an image from your clipboard.
Imports never include Shorts. Their vertical auto-frames are not real thumbnails, so they would only pollute your references.
The Viral Formats Gallery
The gallery is the main set of formats Brainstorm draws from, and the only one when your channel does not yet qualify to remix its own dominant format. Opening it drops a frame of example images on the board, which you can then use with Selected thumbnails to take after one deliberately.
The Board
The board is an infinite canvas:
- Scroll to pan. Hold ⌘ and scroll to zoom. Hold Space, or press H, to drag the board.
- Select an item by clicking it. Drag a box around several items to select them together. Click a frame's label to select everything in it.
- Move and resize anything by dragging. Hold Shift while resizing to keep proportions.
- Undo and redo work for board changes (⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z).
Items live in labelled frames — folders on the canvas. Each import arrives as a new frame, and every generation for the same title lands in a frame named after that title, so a video's thumbnails stay together.
A minimap in the corner shows where you are on the board.
A board holds up to 500 images. When it is full, Studio tells you and asks you to delete images you no longer need before you add more.
Text and Shapes
The Add toolbar down the left side drops the pieces that sit on top of a thumbnail.
Text adds a headline. Its controls cover font, fill colour, outline and thickness, highlight box, drop shadow, size, alignment, and layer order. Defaults come from your channel's analysed thumbnail style, so new text tends to match your look out of the box.
When you generate with Editable text, Studio reserves space for the headline, fits the words into that space, adjusts their contrast, and checks the finished thumbnail before it appears. Changing the wording or resizing its box refits the headline automatically. If the words cannot fit clearly, shorten them or enlarge the box.
Text you add manually hugs its words, including the outline and shadow. Drag its corner handle to scale the type, and press Enter while editing to start a new line.
Elements adds the other YouTube staples: rectangles and ellipses for a backing bar or a highlight zone, and straight or curved arrows (red with a white outline by default) that rotate to any angle and flip to mirror the curve. A rectangle can also fade to transparent toward one side — the classic dark gradient bar behind a lower-third headline.
Layout saves the text and shapes on a thumbnail as a named layout, and applies a saved one to any other thumbnail, scaled to fit and still fully editable. One layout can be the team default so it sorts first for everyone.
Moving a thumbnail carries everything sitting on it — headline, box, arrow, logo — so a finished design never comes apart.
Images
Images in the Add toolbar holds this channel's reusable pictures: faces, a logo, a product shot, arrows, glows, cut-outs. Add an image once and it is there every time you work on this channel.
- Add an image from your computer.
- Place an image with a double-click, a drag onto the board, or the Place button. Dropped onto a thumbnail, it becomes a layer that bakes into exports.
- This is a face marks the photo as a person, which puts them in the People list. Default marks the person who fronts the channel.
- Remove background (1 credit) cuts the subject out and trims the image, so a photo becomes a clean cut-out with real transparency. The file updates in place; if it fails, the original stays and the credit returns.
- Delete removes the image from this channel.
The Focus View
Double-click any finished thumbnail (or select it and click Edit thumbnail) to open the focus view: the image fills the screen, the rest of the board recedes, and a rail appears with everything you need to finish it.
- Versions — every version of this thumbnail, one click apart, or use the ← and → arrow keys. Compare shows a version beside the one it came from.
- Add — the same Text, Elements, Image, and Layout tools, pre-sized to this thumbnail. You can also drag or paste an image straight onto it.
- Contextual controls — click any element and the rail becomes its controls: fonts, size, colour, outline, and highlight for text; kind, fill, outline, rotation, and flip for shapes; ordering and duplication for image layers.
Edit with AI
Edit with AI is ready when you open a thumbnail. Describe one change — "remove the text", "make the sky stormy", "put a shocked expression on him" — and click Apply edit. A new version appears beside this one for one credit, and opens when it is ready. The version you edited is never changed, and your text, shapes, and layers stay on it. If you select a text or image layer, click the thumbnail itself to return to AI editing.
Three controls shape the edit:
- Select an area — drag a box over the image first. The AI works inside that box, and the pixels outside it are kept exactly as they were.
- Add a reference image — show the AI what you mean instead of describing it. Upload a file, take one from Images (this channel's library), or choose a preview under Board. "Put this jacket on him." "Match this colour treatment."
- People — the same person chips as the New thumbnail panel, so an edit that touches a face keeps the right person.
What the AI actually does
An AI edit redraws the image. Without Select an area, expect the whole picture to be re-rendered around your instruction — close to the original, but not pixel-for-pixel identical. With Select an area, everything outside the box you drew is kept from the original.
Finish the Thumbnail
When a thumbnail is ready:
- Merge text into image writes the overlays you can see — text, shapes, and image layers — into the picture and produces a final 1280x720 PNG, YouTube's recommended size. The result lands back on your board, ready to download.
- Attach to project sets the image as a project's thumbnail. Pick the project from the searchable list; the thumbnail then shows on your project board and in the project's details. The board tile gets a small badge with the project's name, so you can always see which image belongs to which video.
Links from elsewhere in Subscribr carry the title straight in: the Open in Studio link on an idea, the thumbnail action on a project card, and the Canvas toolbar's thumbnail button. If the board already has thumbnails for that video, Studio zooms to them so you pick up where you left off; otherwise the New thumbnail panel opens with the title filled in. Nothing generates until you click Generate, so following a link never spends credits.
Next Steps
- Learn what to change between runs in Improving Your Thumbnails.
- Set style instructions so every generation starts from your brand.
- Review Credits & Usage to plan your budget.