Honest Thumbnails for YouTube

Swap clickbait YouTube thumbnails for a real frame or an honest title card. Calm titles, optional AI summaries, no tracking.

Replaces clickbait YouTube thumbnails with a real frame from the video or a clear title card, and tones down shouty titles. FEATURES • Real frame: shows an early, middle or late frame from the video instead of the designed thumbnail. • Title card: shows the title, channel, views and age in a calm card. Hover for likes, chapter count and a clickbait-wording flag. • Peek: hold Alt over a thumbnail to see the original for a moment. • Calm titles: removes ALL CAPS shouting, emoji spam and "!!!" from titles. • Summaries (optional): a one-line gist and key points for a video. If the title promises "7 tips", you get the 7 tips. Uses Chrome's on-device AI, or an AI service or local model you choose with your own key. • Chapters as a free summary: no AI needed when a video has chapters. • Video page panel: summary, chapters and a copy button under the player. • Feed controls: hide Shorts and Mixes, dim videos you've watched, mute words in titles or channel names. • Trusted channels: keep the original thumbnails for channels you choose. • Pause for an hour from the popup, or press Alt+Shift+H to turn everything on or off. The toolbar icon turns grey while it's off. HOW TO USE 1. Open YouTube. Thumbnails switch to real frames right away. 2. Click the toolbar icon to choose Real frame, Title card or Original, and to turn features on or off. 3. With Title card on, hover a video and press ✨ Summarize. Pick where summaries come from in Settings. PRIVACY No accounts, no analytics, no servers run by the developer. Your settings sync through your Chrome profile; the cache of video details and summaries stays on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere for summaries unless you choose your own AI service, and then only to the address you enter. PERMISSIONS • Read and change data on youtube.com: to replace thumbnails and titles on YouTube pages and read public video details (description, chapters, captions) for title cards and summaries. • Optional access to one more site: asked only if you set up your own AI service (for example api.openai.com or a local Ollama server), or turn on SponsorBlock sponsor times. Nothing extra is requested by default. SUPPORT Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue at https://github.com/sub8u/honest-thumbnails/issues Free and open source (MIT). Made by Subrahmanyam KVJ. Not affiliated with YouTube or Google. Version 1.5.0: new look, peek at the original, dim watched videos, muted words, and readable summary cards.