Changing thumbnail pics in iPhone MOV file

[sonnenschein78]

Hi to All,

First, many thanks to Phil and the whole team of developers for the Exiftool. Never seen such a great to organize and structure my pictures database.

Now I have a short question and need your support. I am not sure whether this works with Exiftool.

I have copied several MOV video files from my iPhone to my local drive on my Windows 11 PC. For whatever reason (no idea why) some of the videos do not show any thumbnail pic in Windows Explorer (just the normal VLC logo), most of them do.

Now I have created the according thumbnails as JPG files.

Can I use the ThumbnailImage option and exchange or even create the thumbnail pic withinin the MOV video? Does the change option work for MOV file type? In the overview of the supported file types I see the R / W options, but in my first tries it did not work. Possibly I have used the wrong options and parameters.

Would be great to get a short feedback. Or even a command line example... Thanks.

Regards,
Klaus

[wywh]

I have not had trouble with the default movie thumbnails a.k.a. PosterFrames on the macOS. But recently I had some trouble editing custom PosterFrames especially with .png which could be >30 MB with 4K 10-bit movie input via ffmpeg -- .jpg is much smaller and less problematic with the same input. Usually .mp4 and .m4v behave about the same while .mov might have more differences regarding how metadata is handled.

Are there any differences in the movie or in the workflow to transfer the movie where Windows displays the .mov thumbnail and where it does not?

https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=16001.msg86032#msg86032

- Matti

[sonnenschein78]

Hi Matti,

I have just detected that the video which has the thumbnail and which looks fine has a size of round about 50 MB, where as the other videos with no thumbnail have a size of more than 200 MB. Is this a sizing issue?

Can I use Exiftool or the ffmpeg tool to adjust the thumbnails? Any idea?? Would be really great!

Regards,
Klaus