YouTube Banner Size
2560 by 1440, of which a phone shows about a fifth. Drop an image in, see where the safe area falls, and save it on your own machine.
Runs on your device — images are never uploadedDrop your images here
or click to browse — as many as you like
JPG · PNG · WebP · HEIC
Enlarging past the original cannot add detail that was never captured. The tool says so when it happens rather than quietly handing back something softer.
How it works
Three steps, no account, and the image never leaves your computer.
Drop the image in
JPG, PNG, WebP or an iPhone HEIC. Several at once is fine — they all come out the same size.
The size is already set to 2560 by 1440
Change it if you need something else. Cover crops to fill, Contain fits the whole picture and pads the rest.
Check the preview, then save
The crop is shown before anything is written, so what you get is what you saw.
What people resize to this
A photograph used as channel art
Landscape photos are close to the right shape already, and the preview shows exactly which edges go.
A design exported from Canva or Figma
Templates come out at anything from 1920 to 4000 wide. This puts it back to the size YouTube stores.
A banner that looked right on a laptop
Re-cropping so the title sits inside the rectangle a phone shows, rather than across the full width.
Several versions for a channel refresh
A batch at once, all the same size, so the shape is decided once rather than four times.
One image, cropped four different ways
2560 by 1440 pixels, 16:9, under 6 MB. That is what YouTube asks for, and on its own it is the less useful half of the answer — because hardly anybody ever sees that image.
A channel banner is the one graphic on the internet that is cropped differently depending on where it is opened.
| Opened on | What is actually shown |
|---|---|
| A television | The whole 2560 × 1440 image |
| A desktop browser | A wide strip, roughly 2560 × 423 |
| A tablet | About 1855 × 423 |
| A phone | 1546 × 423 — which is where most people are |
Every one of those crops is centred on the same point, so there is one rectangle that survives all of them: 1546 by 423 in the middle. That is about 60 per cent of the width and 29 per cent of the height, and it is the only part of your banner you can count on.
| Size | Ratio | File limit |
|---|---|---|
| 2560 × 1440 px | 16:9 | 6 MB |
Everything that matters goes in the middle
The channel name, the logo, the upload schedule, the handle — all of it inside that centre rectangle. What sits outside is background: a colour, a texture, a photograph that can lose its edges without anybody noticing.
The usual mistake is designing across the full 2560 by 1440 canvas, filling it corner to corner, and then finding the phone crop has taken both ends off the title.
Then why upload 2560 wide at all?
Because televisions show the whole thing, and YouTube keeps what you give it. Upload only the safe area and you get a short strip stretched across a TV screen — which looks considerably worse than a plain background around a small design.
The text has to survive being tiny
That 423-pixel strip renders a few hundred pixels wide on a phone. Text set at a tenth of the safe area’s height is illegible there. Three or four words, large, high contrast — the same discipline a thumbnail needs, for the same reason.
JPG or PNG, and the 6 MB ceiling
A 2560 by 1440 photograph saved as PNG runs to several megabytes and can breach the limit on its own. Save a photographic banner as JPG. Keep PNG for flat colour and hard-edged text, where it stays crisp and is usually the smaller file anyway.
Cover or Contain, and what each throws away
Two ways to fit one shape into another, and the tool offers both.
Cover fills the frame completely and crops whatever does not fit. Nothing is distorted and nothing is padded; some of the picture is simply gone. This is what you want almost always.
Contain fits the whole image inside the frame and fills the leftover space with a colour you choose. Nothing is lost, but the picture is smaller and there are bars. Right when the whole frame matters — a poster, a diagram, a design you cannot cut.
Neither ever stretches. An image squashed to fit is the one mistake that cannot be undone by looking at it again later.
Nothing is uploaded
The resizing happens in your browser using your own processor, so the image never leaves your machine. That is why there is no file-size limit, no queue and no account, and why a batch of forty is limited by your computer rather than by somebody’s free tier.
Common questions
What size should a YouTube banner be?
2560 by 1440 pixels, 16:9, under 6 MB. YouTube’s stated minimum is 2048 by 1152, but 2560 is what fills a television without being enlarged.
What is the YouTube banner safe area?
1546 by 423 pixels in the centre — about 60 per cent of the width and 29 per cent of the height. That rectangle is shown on every device. Everything outside it is cropped somewhere.
Why is my banner cut off on a phone?
Nothing is wrong. A phone shows only the central 1546 by 423, so a design that runs to the left and right edges loses them. Move the text into the middle and the crop stops mattering.
Should I upload something larger than 2560 wide?
There is nothing above 2560 by 1440 that YouTube displays, so the extra pixels are upload time spent on something nobody sees — and they push the file towards the 6 MB limit.
More image tools
Every one of them runs on your device. No uploads, no accounts.