A Few Helpful Hints About Substack Thumbnail Images
This will ensure your homepage looks like a place your readers will understand and enjoy.
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Letâs talk about thumbnail images today. Once again, this post is inspired by a fellow Substacker who was unaware of this tidbit.
The thumbnail image is what displays on your homepage as the feature image for each post.
The perfect size and orientation for a thumbnail image is a landscape (horizontal) layout with 2240 x 1260 px dimensions. If you use Canva, the âBlog Bannerâ template is perfect.
This image was made using the Blog Banner template in Canva:
You donât have to custom-create thumbnail images; you can certainly use your own photos and images. However, if you use TALL (portrait) images instead of WIDE (landscape), they will not display correctly on your homepage.
Hereâs what you need to know about Substack defaults for thumbnail images:
If you insert one or multiple images into your post, Substack will choose the FIRST one as the thumbnail display.
However, you can change that by clicking the âSettingsâ button in the bottom right corner of your post draft. Once youâre inside the settings page, youâll see this social preview box with an option to âupload newâ.
You have two choices from here:
You can click on âUpload Newâ circled in red, and upload ANY image you wish to display as your thumbnail.
You can hover your mouse over the image thatâs currently there, and youâll see a little grid pop up showing all images used in your post. From there, you can select which image youâd like to set as your thumbnail.
One more worthwhile tip for thumbnail images:
Go into your dashboard Âť settings Âť then type âcropâ into the left search box (see screenshot below). Locate the âPost thumbnail cropping methodâ and select CENTER. Trust me on this. The âSmart croppingâ option hasnât proven to be very smart. CENTER works best.
Thatâs all for this week! I hope this provided you with some insight into selecting the best thumbnail images for your homepage.
Did you know about this tip already?
So you're telling me that for the last year and a half I've been using the wrong size for my thumbnail images that was provided by another Substacker đ. I had set it and forget it even when the image sometimes didn't come out exactly the way that I wanted it to. I figured it was just a fluke.
The nice thing about this is that now I have access to Canva templates for this size which will save me from having to recreate every image from scratch.
Thanks for another great article! And for setting the record straight đľđź.
Agreed, smart cropping is not smart. It's also worth mentioning that size of your thumbnails varies depending on the setup of your homepage. Some thumbnails are wider than others. And the croping for a podcast image is different than the thumbnail too.