YouTube Music now lets you upload custom playlist thumbnails

Abner Li | Oct 21 2024 - 7:46 am PT

YouTube Music already lets you generate AI art for playlist thumbnails, and it now lets you upload your own custom image.

Update 10/21: Last week, YouTube announced a series of new features, including several updates to playlists. The ability to upload custom thumbnails using your own images is now widely rolling out.

Open a playlist on music.youtube.com and tap the pencil icon on artwork. After selecting an image from your device, YouTube Music offers a simple crop tool. Tapping the pencil again lets you “Remove custom image” to get back the default 2×2 grid.

At the moment, we’re only seeing this upload capability on the web player. It’s not appearing in the mobile app. Meanwhile, you might have to visit youtube.com/verify to provide a phone number before being able to upload your own images.

Original 10/14: At least one user today has spotted a new pencil icon in the bottom-right corner of artwork when viewing a playlist on music.youtube.com. It lets you “Choose from library” and “Remove custom image.”

The former lets you select an image from your PC and then crop the thumbnail. The playlist page updates after a second with the background also refreshing.

For some, the ability to personalize their YouTube Music library in this manner has been a highly-requested feature. If you don’t use AI generated artwork, the default is showing a 2×2 grid of albums in the playlist that’s not very recognizable.

It remains to be seen whether you can customize art for the Liked Music playlist, with the AI generator not working there.

Notably, as of August 2023, the YouTube Music team was not working on custom uploads.

We’ve so far only seen one report of custom playlist thumbnails going alive, and are not yet seeing it on our YouTube Music accounts.