This is a quick tutorial for creating nice images that link to videos in your newsletters. ALC Oahu and Arcadia Learning Commons are having screenings of Class Dismissed this week. Both sent out email newsletters letting their communities know about it. Emails can’t display embedded videos, but Oahu wanted to share the trailer. A great way to do this is to have a screenshot of the video with a little play button on top. I will show you how to make that without using photoshop!

Creating an image with a play button

Get the image! You can take a screenshot or search Google for a nice screen from the video, which is pretty easy. If you are using a YouTube video you can get a screenshot generated from the video automatically. You’ll need the video ID for this to work, it’s found in the URL of the YouTube video:

It’s after the ‘v=’ bit and before the ampersand (&). Take that code and put it in this URL:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/<put code here>/0.jpg

That link should give you a large image from the video! Here’s an example:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/0FMrQXkFCxA/0.jpg

Now we take our URL over to Giikers.com image generator: giikers.com/iwc/

Drop the URL into the field labeled Image URL, select your play button, then (optionally) set the width and hit generate. You should now have an image to download! That’s it.