Pikzels AI Thumbnail Creator – What I Loved and What I Hated

Here are the features that attracted me to Pikzels. 

#1 Persona Generation

We can call this “cloning yourself” or “making yourself a prompt.”

To make a persona, you will upload 20 images of yourself and the AI will train itself on them. 

These don’t need to be professional photos, they just need to be different angles of you and in various lightings. 

I had more than enough from my photo library to cover this. 

Once you’ve made a persona, you can use it in your original designs or as a “face swap” to existing designs. 

Here’s an example of a simple graphic I created from a prompt using my persona.

I can then edit the design further with prompts. 

For example, I highlighted the space across the top 3rd of the video and asked Pikzels to put the text “Late Nights” behind me. 

Here’s what the output came out to look like. 

Not bad!

We can also use personas in the “Recreate” feature.

Simply find a thumbnail you like and provide a prompt. 

I used this one…

I just told it to replace the person with my persona.

I got this..

I look kindof dumb, but I can edit that further if I wanted. 

You’ll notice also that some things will need corrected. Like the ChatGPT icon and the background aren’t the same.

#2 Styles

Pikzels lets you create a style template you can repeat to maintain consistency. 

This works if you have your own style you already like or if you have a style from another creator you’d like to emulate. 

You can replicate the style of a full channel or just upload the images you like. 

I recommend the latter, uploading just the styles you like best. 

If you run an agency, this is a fantastic way to organize your clients and keep their designs on brand. 

There are two huge features that need to be released soon for Pikzels to really hold its spot as the top AI thumbnail software. 

“Coming Soon” Feature #1 Enhance Existing Thumbnails

The ability to upload your own thumbnail and tell the AI to “make it better” is supposedly coming soon. 

The inability to upload your own graphics or images into your thumbnails really makes it nearly impossible for me to create 100% of my thumbnails with Pikzels.

For example, if I want to show a specific screenshot of something on an iPhone screen, I would have to do that part myself. I can’t upload that screenshot into the app.

This is frustrating because other programs like Grok, ChatGPT and Ideogram support this functionality.

Here’s a video showing how I can use my own media and have ChatGPT turn it into a custom design. 

I find myself regularly bringing my designs into Canva to finish them. 

Pikzels Pricing and Credits System

Pikzels offers three pricing tiers (essential, premium and ultimate), but only the middle tier (premium) makes sense to me. 

The cheaper plan doesn’t have the functionality that provide most of the value (personas, styles and face swap).

The only real value of the higher tier is the much larger amount of credits. The only new “features” from the Ultimate tier are “early access to new features” and it keeps your generations private.

I get annoyed when companies use “early access” as a sales point and the ability to keep my generations private means nothing to me. These are, afterall, going to be public thumbnails. There are no secrets here 🙂

#2 Edits cost 10 credits each. It is very unlikely your first output will be exactly what you want.  You still have to pay for bad outputs. This is frustrating but I don’t let it bother me. I just assume I’ll need to spend about 50 credits per thumbnail. 

If you run out of credits, you can always buy more. $15 gets you 500 credits and $115 gets you 4500.

Keep in mind, annual credits only roll over on the highest tiered plan. 

Is Pikzels Worth It?

I have found the $28/month plan ($336 paid annually) to be a good purchase.

I am paying that mostly just for the personas (cloning yourself), styles and face swapping.

The other features like generating a thumbnail from scratch lose their allurement if you’ve used a tool like Ideogram or even ChatGPT recently. The title generating feature is also just an afterthought feature that is only interesting if you’re unaware of the endless number of other options out there. 

Although it’s far from perfect and has obvious shortcomings, for the serious creator, this tool should pay for itself quickly. I still find myself pulling images into Canva to finish them, but I have no regrets!

If you’re interested in trying Pikzels for yourself, click the link below.