YouTube Thumbnail Resizer

Why 1280 by 720, and why 2 MB

YouTube asks for custom thumbnails at 1280 by 720 pixels, a 16:9 rectangle with a minimum width of 640, and it refuses any file over 2 MB. Those two numbers are the whole reason this page exists. Upload something at the wrong ratio and YouTube pads or crops it for you, with no say in where the crop lands. Upload something too large and the file is rejected outright. This tool always writes exactly 1280 by 720 and always keeps the export under the size ceiling, so the decision about what gets cut is yours rather than the platform's.

Worth remembering while you design: the same image appears at wildly different sizes. On a television it fills a panel, in a mobile search result it is a few centimetres wide. Text that reads comfortably at full size turns into a grey smudge in a sidebar, which is why three or four large words beat a sentence. YouTube also stamps the video duration over the bottom right corner, so keep faces and words clear of that patch.

The two fit modes, and how each one decides

Crop to fill compares your image's aspect ratio against 16:9. If your picture is wider than 16:9, the full height is used and equal slices are taken off the left and right. If it is taller, the full width is used and equal slices come off the top and bottom. The surviving rectangle is then scaled to fill the frame edge to edge with no bars. The crop is always taken from the centre, which is the thing to know before you upload: a subject sitting near one edge of a tall photo can be trimmed away.

Fit with padding does the opposite. The whole image is scaled down until it fits inside the frame, centred, and the leftover space is filled with a colour you choose from the picker (black by default). Nothing is lost, which suits logos, flat graphics and artwork with text that runs to the edges. The trade is that the bars are visible in the feed. Picking a padding colour that matches the background of your artwork usually hides the join.

Drawing uses the browser canvas with high quality smoothing on. Scaling down looks clean; scaling up adds no detail, so a 640 by 360 source stretched to full size will look soft.

Keeping the file under the ceiling

Choose JPEG and the first encode runs at quality 0.92, which is high enough that compression artefacts are hard to spot on a photograph. Choose PNG and the export is lossless, which is what you want for flat colour and crisp lettering. If either result comes back over 2 MB, the tool re-encodes as JPEG starting at quality 0.9 and steps down in tenths until the file fits or reaches 0.4. That matters for PNG users: a busy photographic PNG can exceed the limit, and when it does the download you receive is a .jpg rather than a .png. The finished file is named youtube-thumbnail-1280x720 with the matching extension, and the line under the preview updates to show the final size in kilobytes.

A worked example

Take a 4032 by 3024 photo straight off a phone, which is 4:3. In crop to fill, the image is narrower than 16:9, so the full 4032 pixel width is kept and the height is cut to 4032 divided by 1.778, which is 2268 pixels. That removes 378 pixels from the top and 378 from the bottom before the remainder is scaled to 1280 by 720. In fit with padding, the same photo is scaled to 960 by 720 and centred, leaving 160 pixels of your chosen colour down each side.

What this tool will not do

It accepts PNG, JPEG and WebP only. HEIC files from an iPhone, AVIF, animated GIF and SVG are turned away, so convert first. There is no drag handle for repositioning the crop, no rotation, no filters and no text layer. Very large source images, in the fifty megapixel range, can make an older phone stall while the canvas decodes them. The preview and the download are generated from the same drawing code, so what you see is what you get. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded to a server. Exporting is free of charge; when you run out of credit, a rewarded ad plays for a few seconds before the next download.

Other sizes and finishing touches

For a vertical cover at 1080 by 1920, use the Instagram Story Resizer. For a square profile image, a channel banner or any custom dimensions, the general Image Resizer takes whatever numbers you give it, and Crop Image lets you choose the region by hand when centre cropping is not what you want. To add a headline over your artwork, try Add Text to Image or the Meme Maker. If a different upload form has a tighter size limit than YouTube's, Compress Image to KB targets an exact file size, and Image Converter handles format changes such as HEIC or AVIF into JPEG first.

Thumbnail questions

What size should a YouTube thumbnail be?

1280 by 720 pixels at a 16:9 ratio, with 640 pixels the minimum width YouTube will accept. This tool writes 1280 by 720 every time, so the output is always the recommended size.

What happens if my image is not 16:9?

You choose. Crop to fill trims equal amounts from the centre of the long dimension so the frame is filled edge to edge, while fit with padding scales the whole picture down and fills the gaps with a colour you pick.

Why did my PNG download as a JPG?

Because the PNG came out larger than YouTube's 2 MB limit. The tool re-encodes as JPEG and steps the quality down until the file fits, which changes the extension. Photographic images compress far better as JPEG anyway.

Can I move the crop away from the centre?

Not here. The crop is always taken from the middle of the image. If your subject sits near an edge, crop it manually first and then bring the result back to this tool.

Which file types can I upload?

PNG, JPEG and WebP. HEIC, AVIF, animated GIF and SVG are not accepted, so convert those to one of the three supported formats before resizing.