YouTube Thumbnail Size
1280 by 720, and the two corners YouTube covers with its own interface. Drop an image in and it is cropped to fit, 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 1280 by 720
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 frame from the video itself
Usually the wrong shape, always the wrong size. Crop deliberately rather than letting YouTube pick the middle.
A photo from a phone
Portrait 3:4 into landscape 16:9 loses a lot. The preview shows exactly what goes before it is gone.
A design from Canva or Figma
Often exported at 1920 or 2560 wide, which is more than needed and pushes the file over 2 MB.
A batch for a series
Several at once, all to the same size, so a channel looks like a channel.
The size is the easy part
1280 by 720 pixels, 16:9, under 2 MB. That is the whole specification, and getting it right is five seconds of work. Getting a thumbnail that people click is a different problem, and most of it comes down to two things nobody tells you.
It is displayed tiny
You design at 1280 pixels wide. It appears at about 360 in a sidebar, and smaller than that on a phone. Whatever you write on it has to be readable at a fifth of the size you are looking at.
The practical rule: three or four words, in text at least a tenth of the image height. If you have to shrink the browser window to check, it is already too small.
The bottom right corner is not yours
YouTube prints the video duration over the bottom-right corner, in a black box, on every thumbnail everywhere. The progress bar for a partly watched video covers the bottom edge as well.
So keep faces, text and anything that matters out of roughly the bottom right eighth, and off the bottom five per cent entirely. This is the single most common mistake, and it is invisible until the video is published.
| Size | Ratio | File limit |
|---|---|---|
| 1280 × 720 px | 16:9 | 2 MB |
Contrast beats detail
A thumbnail competes in a grid with a dozen others, at a size where detail disappears. What survives is a simple shape, a face, and a strong difference between the subject and the background. What does not survive is a screenshot of your interface, however proud you are of it.
What happens if you upload the wrong size
YouTube accepts it and crops to 16:9, choosing the middle. A square image loses the top and bottom, a portrait one loses most of itself, and you find out afterwards. Resizing first means the crop is your decision, and the preview here shows it before you save.
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 thumbnail be?
1280 by 720 pixels, which is 16:9, under 2 MB, as JPG or PNG. That is what YouTube asks for and what this page resizes to.
Why does part of my thumbnail get covered?
The duration badge sits in the bottom-right corner of every thumbnail, and the progress bar covers the bottom edge of a partly watched video. Keep anything important out of the bottom-right eighth.
Is 1920 by 1080 fine instead?
It is the same shape, so it will not be cropped, but it is more pixels than YouTube shows and it pushes the file towards the 2 MB limit for no benefit. 1280 by 720 is the size to use.
Is my image uploaded?
No. The resizing happens in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine and there is no size limit or queue.
More tools
Every one of them runs on your device. No uploads, no accounts.