YouTube Thumbnail Size and Specs: The Complete Reference
If your thumbnail is the wrong shape or too heavy, YouTube will crop it, compress it or reject it. These are the numbers to work with.
The official requirements
- Resolution: 1280 × 720 pixels, with a minimum width of 640 pixels.
- Aspect ratio: 16:9. Other ratios get letterboxed or cropped.
- File size: under 2 MB.
- Formats: JPG, GIF or PNG.
Why a downloaded thumbnail may be smaller
YouTube keeps several copies of each preview image. The largest, maxresdefault, only exists when the uploader supplied a picture of at least 1280 pixels wide. Videos uploaded long ago, or with an automatically chosen frame from a low-resolution source, often top out at 640 × 480 or even 480 × 360.
The 4:3 black bar surprise
The sddefault and hqdefault files are 4:3, so a 16:9 picture is shown with black bars at the top and bottom. If you want a clean widescreen image without bars, use the HD version or the 320 × 180 mqdefault file.
Design rules that save you trouble
- Keep important text and faces away from the bottom-right corner, where YouTube overlays the video duration.
- Use large, high-contrast text that is still readable at 120 pixels wide, the size of a thumbnail in a sidebar.
- Leave a safe margin of roughly 5% around the edges so nothing is cut off on TVs and small cards.
Fixing an image that is the wrong size
Use our image resizer to produce an exact 1280 × 720 JPG. It can crop, fit with bars, or stretch, and it compresses the result below 2 MB automatically.