Make Great YouTube Thumbnails for FREE with Google Drive

hi there Jamie King here today a teachers tech hope you're having a great day today I want to show you how to make great-looking thumbnails for your YouTube channel using Google Drive more specific more specifically Google slides inside Google Drive so let's get started with these simple steps right now so I'm just gonna be working from a demo

account today and remember if you have a YouTube account you have a Google account your Google Apps you can use for free so take advantage of it for this so I'm gonna go up top here to my Google Apps launcher and I'm just gonna go into my Google Drive here so when I open up my Google Drive I'm gonna create a folder here where I'm gonna store my thumbnail so how I do that I'm just gonna right click and there's different ways you can do it but I'm gonna right click in this one and I'm gonna just go new folder and I'm couldn't call this thumbnails here oh and by the way I'll put a different video out how to create channel art using the same thing that I show you here so I'll put that in there cards above or in the links down below if you're interested in that too so now I have this folder already created I'm gonna go in it and this is where I'm going to create my Google slides from because it will stay nicely organized in the folder so I'm gonna right click on this one and I'm gonna go to Google slides - I'm gonna go

slides and I'm gonna go - I'm gonna go from blank presentation on this one and then I'm gonna make some adjustments here so Google slides opens up the first thing is I'm gonna make sure I have the right size on this one the actually the size the 16 to 9 ratio would fit pretty closely to this one but what I'm gonna do is go ahead and make an adjustment to show you how you make a judgement adjustments to this I'm going to turn this to pixels I'm gonna go up top to file and I'm gonna go to page setup and you can see how it says wide screen right here 16 to 9 I'm gonna go to custom I'm gonna turn this to pixels right here and this is where I put in my 19 to 20 by 1080p here so I hit OK and you can see it kind of looks like the same proportions but now

we're in the right size with pixels on this one so the other thing is I can do is I can delete if I didn't want these text boxes here I just have to click on the edge or hit delete on these ones if you ever wanted a blank one up here I could hit click on blank down here if I hit that little drop-down arrow you can see it creates a brand new slide I could go us back and delete I'm just right clicking on different ones now and I have a blank slide so I have it the right size so let's start putting things in actually before I do that I'm going to name this example some here so there's my example I just want to make sure everything's getting saved so if I click on Google Drive notice it's right here so if I just refresh this real quick you can see examples some it's already saved and everything in your Google Drive so

at this point here I'm going to start by just inserting some text so if I want to insert some text I could have wrote written in what they had before but I can insert a text box so if I just draw it out here and I'll just say I'm just gonna call this thumbnails here on this one and this so I have it very small though but I can go to this and double click and select this I can pick a different font let's pick I'm gonna pick just oswalt you can see I have a few different options I'm gonna go bold I'm gonna make this a lot bigger here I'm gonna go all the way to 96 and I'm gonna change this to maybe a red color you can see all the different options that you can do if you wanted to underline it so it gives you a

lot of options to get the right font that you want I'm gonna just shrink this a little bit I don't need this box this small I can move it all over the page here wherever I want and I can rotate it around to change the angle so if you ever use something like canva to do your thumbnails Google slides can work very slimmer too similar to that one too so that's one way to insert my text the other thing I can do if I go to insert I can go over to where it says word art and I'll just soap I clicked off and I'll do that again word art and alright YouTube here hit enter and I have YouTube now I can again go to this and I can change my font I'll join you to impact this time I can move this around I can rotate it I'll put this baby up here get a bit more angle on this you can see as I click on it I have some different bills that I could put maybe I want this black with a white back weight

around it you can't see it very well because it's on white and I can actually change maybe I'll change it to three still can't but what I can do is I can change the background so you can see backgrounds right there so I click on and you can I could go to a color so maybe if I wanted to go to color and now you can really see the stroke around the YouTube the other thing I could also do if you didn't want it's just a solid color maybe you want to do a picture in the background so go back to background you can see I can choose a picture so I could upload take a snapshot by URL I'm gonna go to I'm just going to do a search on this one cuz since I'm in my demo account I'll type in maybe I want mountains as my background and I'll just click this one right here hit select hit done and now I have these mountains in

it so I can put images very easy add all this the other things I can do look at all the insert options that you can have from your diagrams maybe you want some shapes here so if I go ahead and pick maybe this rectangle I'll draw this out so you could put it across your whole bottom so maybe you wanted to write something in there I could write something again I can change the color to anything that I wanted in this if I wanted it maybe I'll just pick a color of blue and I can write on top of this I can take this and maybe I want this down here you notice that the orders wrong all I have to do is right-click on it and if I go to order I can bring to the front so you can have your layers and put things on different tops of it so it's really easy to manage whatever how creative you get on your thumbnail you can bring it in so I could bring in more things like pictures so I have my insert if I was going to put insert image I'm I don't have to eat upload right now but I'll just search the web and I'm just gonna put dog and I'll just pick this one right here and I'm just gonna drag it over and I have this dog in here so if you want to Malta Mauritius in here and I can do all the same things I can resize it I can we have crop up here that if I wanted to maybe adjust the sides the size of it a bit I can hit enter

enter the other thing I like what you can do take a look beside the crop we have image masks so if I wanted it inside a different shape I can do that so you could have that right on your thumbnail going all those different things so lots of great options to get everything really effective on it the other thing I like doing is you can just go over maybe I wanted this picture I could go ahead and copy this image and just paste it over here and I have it inside very quickly on to my thumbnail there's some

more ways to add some quick effects to all your images and your fonts too if I go ahead and click on this look up top where you have format options when I click format options I'm gonna click on it I'm gonna close this one here first so I got format options and this is open notice I can add summary if I wanted to quickly recolor go ahead click on it you can see I can recolor it you can open these up where you see those little arrows to make any adjustments to it so there's like transparency I can reset things on this so it will bring back the adjustments to it I could add drop shadows just by clicking on it if I wanted to drop shadow a little bit further away from it or not transparency maybe distance you can see how it moves or maybe I want to add a reflection to it so all these things you can quickly add if I click on this notice I have the format options too so just more adjustments to get your YouTube thumbnail looking the exact way that you want to have it so when

you're all done this and you have everything in place on your thumbnail you're gonna want to download it and so to do this just simply go here to file download as and if you whether you want a JPEG or PNG I'll just do it as a JPEG here so I click on JPEG and it's gonna download and I have this picture I click on it open and this is what I'm gonna upload this file that's downloaded on my computer now I can upload to my thumbnail in place on YouTube if I look over into my thumbnails inside my folder that I made here it is this is my google slide so maybe next time to speed up by maybe there's a template that I've created and I just go and alter a change and I make a copy each time so I can populate all this with all the different thumbnails that I can go back maybe make some quick adjustments to and this is all free and it's stored right inside your Google Drive that you get automatically with your Google with your gmail account that you have so I am gonna put together another video just going over channel art using the same process so check that out either down below in the links or in the card up above in the right-hand corner I hope you like this tip today if you have tell some other people maybe you can save them some time or some money thanks for watching this week and that's meet you next time