Smart Thumbnails picks the most visually compelling frames from a video, helping teams improve engagement and reduce manual work.

LOS ANGELES, June 22, 2026 — Qencode, a cloud video infrastructure platform, today announced Smart Thumbnails, allowing users to create more engaging thumbnails automatically. This feature uses AI to select the optimal images from the videos during the encoding process and provides a ranked list that can be automated as part of your current pipeline.

Why It Matters

Thumbnails have the biggest effect on viewer click-through rate, so selecting the right thumbnail is the most important decision a platform can make to boost engagement. Video platforms and creators often spend too much time and effort scrubbing footage frame by frame, or end up going with a less sophisticated automated approach that settles for random stills that fail to capture viewer’s attention. Qencode Smart Thumbnails solves this by automatically selecting the best frame during the transcoding job, helping platforms reduce work and time to platform, while drastically reducing operational overhead.

How It Works

When Smart Thumbnails are added as an output, Qencode analyzes the source video using AI and selects the frames best suited to add interest and excitement for the users to click. Users have the flexibility to configure thumbnail settings for each job, giving platforms the tools they need to generate images that match the unique look and feel across every title in their catalog. Smart Thumbnails can also produce multiple candidate images per video, to give end-users more options or to create a built-in pool for A/B testing.

Availability

Smart Thumbnails is available now through the Qencode API and the Qencode Portal. Full setup instructions are available in the Smart Thumbnails Tutorial.