If you've ever wanted to preview your YouTube thumbnail before posting your video so you can see what it will look like alongside your video title and channel logo, you may have struggled to find the tools to do that.

But fortunately, this guide will walk through 3 different methods for previewing your YouTube thumbnail alongside your video title and see how it'll look on the YouTube home and up next pages.

Whether you just want to send your video packaging to friends for feedback or just want to optimize your thumbnail for viewing on YouTube, this guide is for you.

Use an online YouTube Thumbnail Preview tool

To preview your thumbnail, there are many online YouTube thumbnail preview tools that make previewing your YouTube thumbnails easy.

Thumbnail.live is a free tool that offers many different YouTube thumbnail preview tools so you can see how your thumbnail will look on YouTube. In specific, you can use this link to see how your thumbnail will look on the YouTube home page.

In addition, you can see how your thumbnail will look on the up next page, on the search page, and next to popular videos with these online tools:

• Up next page YouTube thumbnail previewer
• Search page YouTube thumbnail previewer
• In feed YouTube thumbnail previewer

Use inspect element to edit your thumbnail onto the YouTube home page

You can use a browser tool called inspect element to edit your thumbnail onto YouTube. By highlighting the text you want to change and right clicking, you can press inspect element to edit the page's source code. You can then replace the text with your video title.

To change a YouTube video thumbnail with inspect element, right click the video's thumbnail and edit its source to be a link to your thumbnail.

For example, the code for a YouTube thumbnail image will look similar to this:

<img src="https://youtube.com/thumbnail.png">

So simply change the src value to a link to your thumbnail image.

<img src="https://example.com/your-thumbnail.png">

Note that inspect element is not permanent and the page will revert to what it was originally if you refresh the browser tab.

Use a photo editing software to edit your thumbnail onto the YouTube home page

If inspect element is too difficult, you can use a photo editing software like Photopea to edit your thumbnail onto the YouTube home page and see how it'll look.

First, take a screenshot of the YouTube home page. Then, edit in your thumbnail and overlap it onto another video. This will allow you to see how your thumbnail looks on the YouTube home page.