1280 × 720
The thumbnail size YouTube wants, and a way to hit it
Twelve hundred and eighty by seven hundred and twenty, sixteen by nine, under two megabytes. Drop an image below and get one that matches exactly.
Processed on your own hardware · never transmitted, never stored
What those numbers are actually for
The same thumbnail is shown at wildly different sizes — a couple of hundred pixels wide in a sidebar, most of the screen on a living room television. Supplying 1280 by 720 gives YouTube enough resolution to scale down cleanly everywhere without carrying weight you gain nothing from.
The two megabyte ceiling almost never troubles a photograph but is easy to exceed with a PNG containing large flat areas of colour. When an upload is refused for size, saving as JPEG instead resolves it nearly every time.
Anything that is not sixteen by nine gets bars added or edges removed by YouTube, and you have no say in which. Matching the ratio before uploading is the only way to keep control of the framing.
Most people will see it at a quarter of this size
A thumbnail typically reaches a viewer at around 360 pixels wide on a phone. Text that reads comfortably while you are designing can become completely illegible at that scale. Shrink your finished thumbnail to a quarter and look again — if the words stop working, the answer is fewer of them and larger, not a different font.
Common questions
What size exactly?
1280 by 720 pixels, sixteen by nine, under two megabytes.
Can I go larger?
Yes. 1920 by 1080 keeps the same ratio and YouTube scales it down without complaint.
Why was mine rejected?
Almost always the file size. Save as JPEG rather than PNG to get comfortably under the limit.
Does my image get uploaded?
No. Resizing happens in the browser using Canvas and nothing is transmitted.