YouTube - How To Upload Custom Thumbnails

Each time you upload a video, YouTube automatically generates a set of three thumbnails for you to choose from. You can stick with YouTube's proposals or upload a custom thumbnail, preferably a beautiful picture or photo you have prepared beforehand. 

Prerequisites

- The popular image formats (optimized for the web) are supported: JPEG or PNG. 
- The maximum file size is 2MB. 

Upload your thumbnail

Sign-in to your YouTube channel and then open the Creator Studio > Video Manager > Videos: 

Select the desired video and then click on the Edit button > Info and Settings tab: 

Click on the Custom Thumbnail button displayed, browse for the image you want to use and click on Save changes: 

Upload Screen Captures directly to Flickr with SnagIt

TechSmith SnagIt 8 screen capture and image editing software is a very integral part of my blogging workflow. Almost all the screen captures and illustrations that you see on this site are created using SnagIt. 

I first capture the screenshots in SnagIt using the shortcut PrntScrn key, enhance the screen captures with borders/effects/titles in SnagIt studio, save the images to local hard drive and finally, I upload them to Flickr or Blogger using Hello.

Sometime in March, I came across Flickr and Webimager, a tiny screen capture utility that directly uploads screenshots to Flickr bypassing the need to save images. Though the features of this free tool are nowhere near Snagit, still I was impressed with the direct-upload-to-flickr idea and suggested it to Techsmith.

I am not sure if Techsmith were already working on this feature or they decided to implement it after receiving my email. But the good news is that now you can upload pictures from SnagIt 8 to Flickr directly. SnagIt has released separate Flickr Profiles which upload the captures to Flickr, and also pastes the Flickr photo link (URL) for the image to your Clipboard.

I now have more time to write articles for my blog.

Download SnagIt Flickr Profile | Video Tutorial: How to use Snagit Flickr

Upload Pictures to Flickr From Windows Live Photo Gallery

This is exciting news for people who use Flickr for storing photographs on the web but prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery on the desktop for managing their picture and video collection offline.

Microsoft today released a  new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you send pictures to Flickr directly from the desktop using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also bulk upload images and folders to Flickr using this new feature of Photo Gallery.

Like the official Flickr uploader, this one from Microsoft will also resize your pictures before uploading them onto Flickr (optional). You can also specify the photo set where that picture should be uploaded to.

Related: Compare Picasa with Windows Live Photo Gallery

If you operate multiple Flickr accounts, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you add them all to the Flickr uploader.

You can download this Flickr enabled version of Windows Live Photo Gallery through Windows Automatic Updates (kb943550) or the common Windows Live Installer here.

Related: Download Flickr Photos in a Batch