Do you own a video blog and spend hours searching for a custom image to accompany your video. Well then I think, time has come to change your work schedule and install automatic featured images from videos plugin. This plugin has been developed by webdevstudios along with 3 more contributors.
Featured images are of great importance for those blogs and websites whose designs are driven completely by graphics. But if you won a video blog and if your theme doesn’t have functionality to automatically generate thumbnails from videos, then you might be wasting hours finding images for your posts. Today there are many premium wordprss theme which has inbuilt support to generate thumbnail from videos. But the problem is not every one have budget to use these premium templates. So in that case these bloggers have just two options, either to search internet for the solution or to search wordpress plugin directory for the perfect addon.
Considering the problems usually faced by video bloggers this plugin was developed. It can help to generate thumbnails from your YouTube and Vimeo videos without performing any extra settings. But it’s important that you place your video within 1000 words section or else it will not perform any action. Another important requirement is that, you have to use the full video url or else this plugin won’t be able to capture featured image for your post.
This plugin also comes with a fallback option. Let’s say that you have already added a custom thumbnail for your post, then this plugin will not add its custom post meta field.
Now you might think what about other popular video services. Well according to the developer, he and his team is working hard for adding support for new services in near future updates.
Some Other Options
There are many different free and premium plugin developed for this task. Though not each of them are easy to use, but they are worth considering if you need more advance features.
Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator
It’s an all in one solution for bloggers who love to self host their videos. It has lots of advance features which allows you to custimize the video player, playback option and thumbnails.
Currently this plugin support 4 different types of player and few of them can be customized. I would like to point out that this plugin is not built for websites which embed videos from different sources. It’s only focused for self video hosted websites and offers support for high definition to low quality playback.
Video Thumbnails
Now if you want to get support for more video sharing sites then this plugin is perfect option for you. Currently it supports 20 different services and even has a professional version with more powerful features.
It has a dedicated option panel which is extremely easy to use. The options are straightforward and doesn’t confuses new users. You get options to save the generated images to your server and to automatically set the featured image. It even allows you to select the post field, which can be either posts or pages.
Inorder to provide your options to include other video sharing platforms it has a dedicated settings page named providers. In the providers setting tab you have to select the services for which you want to add support in your blog.
All the plugins which I have listed in this post are free to use. You can also consider premium plugin, but I don’t think their any reason to do so, untill you really own an engaged video website.
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