Can I change the thumbnail shown in Finder on a video file?

[mgmartino92]

Can I change the thumbnail shown in Finder on a video file? Main file type I use for these videos are .m4v but I can change that.


I want to know if I can change the thumbnail that displays in finder?
Or can I bake the thumbnail in at the exporting/sharing level within Final Cut Pro?
Or lastly is there a setting in finder. Perhaps the setting is "make first frame" or "make last frame" the thumbnail?


Because then I can bake the thumbnail I want, to be the first 5 frames of the video. That's an old trick I used to Use for Instagram thumbnails before they allowed to to add a separate file for the "cover" (aka the thumbnail)


P.S.
I want to note I am talking about the thumbnail that displays on the actual file that we see in Icon view, or List view, etc. I am NOT talking about the thumbnail that displays in the Preview Bar (on the side). Because I noticed those two "covers" are from different points of the video (please see my screenshot).

The reason I want this control in the first place is when I am doing complex searches of 100s of video files. It is much easier for our brains to clock the images in a thumbnail rather than the text of the video title.

Further more if you are using Icon View. Any longer file names are gonna be chopped up with an ellipses "..."

 

[bogdanw]

The reason I want this control in the first place is when I am doing complex searches of 100s of video files. It is much easier for our brains to clock the images in a thumbnail rather than the text of the video title.

"Narrow your search results on Mac" https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/narrow-search-results-mh15155/12.0/mac/12.0

 

[hg.wells]

Here are the steps you need when using Quicktime:

 

[wordwriter]

There's two ways I know of, one works quite often, the other is slower but more reliable.

The first way is this. Open the thumbnail photo you want and Edit, Copy. Then just right-click the video file, select GetInfo, click the movie-camera icon at the top left to highlight it, then Edit, Paste the photo.

That works quite a lot of the time.

The other way is download the LosslessCut free app, load the video file by dragging it to the app window, and then drag the thumbnail photo to the app as well. Use the dropdown menu from the screen that pops up to attach the thumbnail. Export the video, no loss of quality.