Video - Pick a Thumbnail

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Erikka Innes

Tutorials

Python

There are several ways you can add a thumbnail to your video content with api.video. If you're doing a live stream, you can add one with the Upload a Thumbnail endpoint for live streams (I go over how to do that with Python here - [How to Add a Thumbnail to Your Live Stream](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/how-to-add-a-thumbnail-to-your-live-stream)). If you want to choose and add a thumbnail for a video yourself, you can do that with Python and FFMPEG ([tutorial available here](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/automatically-add-a-thumbnail-to-your-video-with-python-and-ffmpeg)). And you can also add a thumbnail by telling the api.video API what frame you want to use. api.video will then set that frame for you. If you choose a frame that's not within the range of your video, the default will be selected, which is the frame at 00:00:00:000. 

## Prerequisites

* api.video account - [Sign up here](https://api.video).
* A video to add a thumbnail to - [Free sample videos](https://www.learningcontainer.com/mp4-sample-video-files-download/) 
* Python installed with the requests library 

You can also check out the API reference documentation for video thumbnails here: [Upload a thumbnail](https://docs.api.video/reference/post_videos-videoid-thumbnail)

## Upload Your Video and Retrieve the videoId

To add a thumbnail, you first need to choose a video you want to add a thumbnail to. Do the following:

1. Upload a video to your api.video dashboard if you haven't already. You have a few choices for how to accomplish this: 
	* Use the GUI to add a video to your dashboard 
	* If your video is under 128 MB, [use these instructions for upload](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/upload-a-video-from-your-computer-with-the-api-video-api-python).
	* If your video is over 128 MB, you can use the [Upload a Big File Using Python](https://api.video/blog/tutorials/upload-a-big-video-file-using-python) tutorial.

2. If your video is already uploaded, you can retrieve the videoId from your dashboard, or you can use the [list all videos](https://docs.api.video/reference/list-videos) endpoint to retrieve and browse through your videoIds for the one you need. I've included the code for retrieving videos here, if you need it. 

## Add a Thumbnail 
To add a thumbnail, you have a few ways you can do things. If you wanted something you could repeat in bulk for each video, then you'd need to choose a spot that you always choose the thumbnail from. You could plan to always choose a thumbnail from five seconds into each video, but what if the video were shorter? While that's unlikely, if this were to occur, api.video automatically adds a thumbnail from 00:00:00:00. 

The code for adding your thumbnail looks like this:

## Add a Thumbnail from Halfway Through the Video
We just saw how to add a thumbnail to a video, and learned how the thumbnail defaults. But what if we wanted to create a thumbnail that's always about halfway through our video? We can use the [Show video status](https://docs.api.video/reference/get-video-status) endpoint to retrieve the length of the video in seconds. 

Here's the code for retrieving the length of the video:

The duration will be returned in seconds. You can divide this in half using '//' in python to get an integer, and then create the timecode using the datetime library. 

The code to set up your request with everything, including a timecode, would look like this:

You can add thumbnails this way for any video. Happy coding! 

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Choose a thumbnail with api.video's pick a thumbnail endpoint 

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