This Dynamic YouTube Thumbnail Image Is “Painted” by the Comments

YouTube used to be a place where people went to post silly videos of their cats, but today YouTubing is big business. There are a lot of YouTubers out there whose videos get more views than many mainstream TV shows. While many of those popular YouTubers purposefully create a casual vibe, you should know that every aspect of their channel is the result of careful decision making intended to increase view. That includes each video’s thumbnail, which can have a massive effect on view numbers. Those thumbnails can be updated and Sean Hodgins has taken advantage of that fact to create this dynamic thumbnail that can be “painted” by user comments.

The thumbnail in question is for the video explaining the thumbnail, which adds a bit of meta fun to the project. When Hodgins first posted this video, that thumbnail was just an image of him standing in front of a blank white canvas. But the thumbnail has been updated with every comment made since then and now the canvas has been filled in with pixels submitted by users in the video’s comment section. Every comment will place a randomly-colored block of 16 pixels in a random location on the canvas, unless the comment is formatted specifically. If your comment follows Hodgins’s designated format, you can choose the exact location and color of the pixels to place. The cool thing is that you can place a bunch of pixels to draw tiny little pictures. Heck, you can even draw your company’s logo (see if you can find ours). The thumbnail image is regularly updated with the new pixels, so your art will show up on Hodgins’s YouTube channel in seconds.

All of that functionality is handled by a Raspberry Pi that monitors this video’s comments through YouTube’s API. If it finds a new comment, a Python script parses the text to determine if pixels should be placed randomly or at a specific location. It then modifies the current thumbnail image with the new pixels and uploads that image to YouTube. A screen connected to the Raspberry Pi gives Hodgins a real time view of the thumbnail. He has also connected an industrial-style emergency stop button to the Raspberry Pi, which he can use to keep the Pi from uploading anything to YouTube if he needs to tinker with the code. Hodgins has even put together a little tool that helps you with your comments. The tool presents you with a block of pixels and lets you draw whatever you like. When you’re finished, it will output a properly-formatted comment for you to post on YouTube!