How To Create A YouTube Channel Icon With Pixlr – a Free Online Photo Editor
YouTube displays a channel icon to represent your channel. You may want to display a profile image of yourself or add a logo for channel branding.
Here are 3 tips to keep in mind before
Create A YouTube Channel Icon:
- Make sure your image size is 800 x 800 pixels. YouTube reduces your image size to 98 x 98 pixels so don’t make it too intricate.
- The format of your image can be JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG but don’t use any animated GIFs
- Don’t upload images containing celebrities, nudity, artwork or copyrighted images. These violate YouTube community guidelines.
- Got to Pixlr.com
- Select the Pixlr editor
- Create a new image or select an image from your computer
- If the image is very large (ie the photo I took from my iPhone was 3264×2448 pixels) you need to reduce it to 800×800 pixels.
- Click “image size”
- Click OK
- Crop the image to 800×800 pixels by using the crop tool
- Save it
- Give your image a name (ie profile.jpg)
- Enhance the image quality by moving the slider up to 100
- Save the image to your desktop
That’s it!
Here Are The Steps To Upload Your Channel Icon To YouTube
YouTube will display a placeholder image on your channel banner if you don’t upload one of your own. This is not good because viewers may think your channel is unfinished and leave.
To upload your new channel icon…
- Log in to your YouTube account
- Go to my channel and hover over your icon. It will display a pencil.
- You’ll get a pop-up saying “edit channel icon your channel icon is linked to your connected Google+ account“
- Click “edit on Google+“
- Click “select a photo from your computer“
- Select your profile photo
- Click “choose” to upload it
- Stretch the image to adjust the size
- Click “set as profile photo“
- The pop-up will say “post about your new photo“
- Cancel the pop-up (if you don’t want to post about it)
- Refresh your Google+ page to view your new photo icon
- Check that the new icon displays correctly
on your YouTube Channel home page (top left corner)
That’s it!
Check how your icon displays on:
- Mobile phones. Your channel icon will automatically get resized to a much smaller version and will appear below your channel art banner next to your channel name.
- Video watch page. Your channel icon will appear under the video title next to your channel name.
- YouTube Comments. Your channel icon and channel name will appear next to all your comments.
And that’s how you create and upload a channel icon to your YouTube Channel.
