Resize an image for a YouTube thumbnail

Resize any image to exactly 1280×720 for a YouTube thumbnail, free and in your browser.

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    What size is a YouTube thumbnail?

    1280×720 pixels, which is 16:9. YouTube shows thumbnails at 16:9 and scales them down hard: the same image has to read at about 360 pixels wide in a sidebar and at full width on a television. 1280×720 is the size YouTube itself asks for, and it is enough to survive both. Upload something taller or squarer and YouTube crops it to 16:9 without asking which part mattered.

    The thing that catches people out

    The thumbnail is also a 2 MB upload, and that is the limit people hit second. Getting the dimensions right does not settle it: a 1280×720 PNG exported from a design tool routinely goes over 2 MB, while the same picture as a JPEG is a few hundred kilobytes. Resize first, and if it is still too heavy, compress it - the two jobs are tabs on the same panel.

    What a YouTube thumbnail does to it afterwards

    YouTube re-encodes your thumbnail the moment it is uploaded and serves several sizes of it, the smallest around 168 pixels wide in a sidebar. Anything you can only read at full size disappears there, which is why channels that live on thumbnails use four or five enormous words rather than a sentence. The bottom right corner is also covered by the duration badge on every surface, so keep faces and text out of it. And the thumbnail is cropped to a circle nowhere and stretched nowhere: 16:9 is honoured exactly.

    What the crop takes off

    A phone photograph is 4:3 and 16:9 is wider, so the crop comes off the top and the bottom - about a quarter of the height, taken equally from both edges. Whatever sat near the top of the frame goes first. The crop is centred, so if your subject is not in the middle vertically, crop it yourself before dropping it here.

    Questions about a YouTube thumbnail

    Does YouTube accept any size, or must it be 1280x720?

    It accepts a range and then makes its own copies, but 1280x720 is what the documentation asks for and it is the size that survives every surface intact. Send something smaller and it is stretched on a television; send something much larger and you are only paying in upload time, since YouTube re-encodes it anyway. The ratio matters more than the pixel count: anything that is not 16:9 gets cropped to it without asking which part of the picture you cared about.

    Why does my thumbnail look blurry on the video page?

    Usually because it was under 2 MB but well under 1280 pixels wide, so YouTube is scaling it up. Occasionally it is the opposite problem: a heavily compressed JPEG pushed under the size limit before uploading, which YouTube then re-encodes a second time. Resize to 1280x720 first and only then compress, and stop as soon as you are under 2 MB rather than going as small as possible.

    Does YouTube re-compress my thumbnail?

    Yes, always, and the only thing you control is what it starts from. The 2 MB limit applies to what you upload; what viewers see is YouTube's own re-encode at several sizes, the smallest around 168 pixels wide in a sidebar. That is the real design constraint. Text legible at 1280x720 and illegible at 168 is text nobody reads, so make the thumbnail work at the size of a postage stamp and it will work everywhere else by accident.

    There is a file size limit too

    YouTube thumbnails are capped at 2 MB, and that is the limit people hit once the dimensions are right, because resizing changes the pixels and not the bytes. Use the Compress tab, or start from compress an image to 2 MB, which opens on that budget.

    Other sizes

    Or any dimensions, or compress.