Finding a frame for a thumbnail

When I was making YouTube thumbnails, finding the perfect facial expression took forever. But YouTube is still a platform where you’re watching for a person, and it’s a click and watch platform, so you do want to put faces on the thumbnails generally.

So I built out an AI skill that helps me do this. So in this one video, it scanned 5,539 different frames. It threw out all the bad ones, ones where I like tucked my chin, mouth half open, mid-word, eyes closed, things like that. And it made sure that it was a real expression that I held, not like some face that I made for a split second.

It uses this model from Cloudflare called CLEF. It’s an image decision model to rank the different faces that I have. I get a sheet of the top faces to pick from.

It’s not perfect right now, but it is pretty good, and it saves me tons of time. At this moment, it doesn’t know exactly what I would want, so it can’t make the final decision, but it gives me a sheet of what I can choose from, and it’s getting pretty close.

Then I use this app called Paper to mock up the different thumbnails with all of those different facial expressions. So I can just run a command, and I can get different versions of the packaging, and I can just step away and do something else.

So if you want this particular skill, comment face, and I’ll send it over to you.