YouTube Custom Thumbnails Suddenly Not Showing

Created and posted some new custom thumbnails in a client's YouTube account and they showed up fine in Google search results for about two days. Suddenly, some of them don't show - although the listings themselves show - but some of them still do show and I can't figure our why. The client is a criminal defense attorney. About the only thing I can think of is that the thumbnails that don't show have pretty girl photos and the thumbnails that do show have male photos, all licensed from $1 photo. The pretty girl images are not racy, e.g. girl with champagne glass for DWI video; girl giving thumbs up for reviews video, etc. The male images are relevant, e.g., police officer, guy in handcuffs. Haven't seen any references to this problem anywhere. Suggestions and observations appreciated.

When you say the thumbnails aren't showing, do you mean the thumbnail image is broken?
or is the video itself ranking as if it was just a website without showing the video thumbnail?

If your thumbnails are showing this or something similar



Set the thumbnail back to one of the 3 randomly generated thumbnails YouTube made for you. Click save changes and reupload the thumbnail image as 1080x720

If the image was already 1080x720, do the same thing, but decrease the thumbnail image size by 50% ... so make it 540x360

Video itself is ranking without a thumbnail...

Are you saying that an "HD" thumbnail source file will make a difference?

FYI: Deleted one video that had a "pretty girl" thumbnail and replaced it with the same video with a "thumbs-up" image on the thumbnail instead of the pretty girl and so far it's ranking with the new thumbnail visible. Is it possible that YT can detect what's actually on a thumbnail without human intervention?

No. This has nothing to do with the image content. Please get that shit out of your head. Upload a PNG 1600x900 that is under 2mb and the image will stay!