Extract thumbnails from any video, right in your browser

Everyone has once been in this situation: you have a video, and the need to create just one good thumbnail. You try creating a screenshot but it never delivers: the photo turns out to be blurry, colors look off and it takes a couple of retries to create a screenshot that will suffice.

This takes up a lot of time and effort, so you go and search for a solution but we all know the outcome: this also does not work, and most web pages send your video to a server, which is something you definitely don't want to do with your family videos!

This is why we have created what you are looking for: Thumbnail Creator! It's free forever, does not send your videos and thumbnails to a server, and has an easy to use interface for your convenience.

What it actually does

I want to take you on a small detour to tell you a little bit about videos and how they are built from the ground up. A video is not a stack of complete pictures. Only some frames, the so-called keyframes, contain a whole image on their own. Everything between the keyframes is stored as a description what changed since the last frame. If you think about it: this is how an entire two-hour movie fits on a DVD!

Our application only captures the keyframes, and because it uses a special discarding mechanism it is possible to skip over all unnecessary frames, making it more optimized and thus faster compared to alternatives.

Back to what the application actually does: insert a video file into the application and click on the "Create thumbnails" button.

The user interface is straight forward and allows you to scrub both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally on the timeline and vertically on the thumbnail previews.

Talking about format support: we do support a lot of codecs! H.264, H.265/HEVC (yes, that's 10-bit footage straight the newest iPhones included), VP8, VP9, ProRes, MJPEG and more. Please do note that AV1 support is coming later: we do not yet support AV1 decoding. And browser support is a no brainer: we support all of them, even Safari! Just note that incognito mode is not guaranteed to work, just so you know.

The last step is downloading your thumbnails

When you click on the "Next" button, the download will automatically start:

If you please, you can start over if you have multiple videos to process.

And that's it! You have now discovered a brand new way to create thumbnails/screenshots from your videos, the right way! We got plenty of tools coming up, and if we got any updates we will let you know.