YouTube has the widest gap on any platform between the size you design at and the size people see. A thumbnail is authored at 1280 pixels wide and judged at about 210.
Every size above is exported by the resizer at the top of this page. The table is generated from the tool’s own preset definitions, so it cannot describe a size the export does not produce.
Designing for YouTube
Design the thumbnail for the sidebar, not the watch page
In the suggested-video column a thumbnail renders around 210 pixels wide, and smaller still in some mobile layouts. That is a sixth of the width you are designing at, which means a sixth of the type size and a sixth of the detail.
The practical test is to zoom your design to 15% and look at it. If the words are unreadable and the subject is ambiguous, the thumbnail does not work — no amount of detail that only appears at full size helps, because almost nobody sees it at full size.
That is why the thumbnails that perform look crude in isolation: three or four words at enormous type, one clear subject, and colours that separate hard from the page around them.
The bottom-right corner belongs to YouTube
YouTube draws the video duration over the bottom-right of every thumbnail, and a red progress bar along the bottom edge once a viewer has partly watched. Anything placed there is covered.
Keep the lower-right eighth free of text and faces. The bottom-left is safe and is a useful place for a channel mark.
Channel art is three crops of one image
The channel banner is the trickiest asset on any platform, because the full 2560 × 1440 is only ever shown on a television. Desktop shows a wide central strip; mobile shows a narrower one again.
Everything that must be legible belongs in the middle — roughly the central 1546 × 423 — and everything outside it is decoration for a viewport most of your audience never uses. Designing to the full canvas and hoping produces a banner that reads on a TV nobody is watching and is cut in half everywhere else.
Shorts are a separate 9:16 frame with its own interface overlays, and cropping a 16:9 thumbnail up to it leaves you with a third of the width. Build vertical frames vertically.
1080 pixels wide, with the height set by the shape you want: 1350 for the portrait format that occupies the most feed space, 1080 for a square, and 566 for landscape. Stories and Reels are 1080 × 1920. The exact numbers for every format this tool exports are in the reference table above, generated from the presets themselves rather than typed from memory.
What size is a YouTube thumbnail?
1280 × 720, a 16:9 frame. That is YouTube's recommended size and the one this tool exports. Design for it to be legible at roughly 210 pixels wide, which is how big it will actually be in a sidebar — a thumbnail that only works at full size is a thumbnail that does not work.
How do I resize one image for every platform at once?
Select every destination you need, then export. The tool crops your image separately for each target ratio, resizes each crop to that platform's pixel dimensions, and packages the whole set into one ZIP with descriptive filenames. One upload of effort, one download, every size correct.
Will my subject get cut off?
Not usually. Rather than cropping from the centre, the tool looks for a face in the image and falls back to a saliency estimate — the region with the most visual detail — then places the crop window around that point. You can nudge the framing afterwards if it chose differently from you, which matters most for the extreme ratios like a 1500 × 500 header.
Is this free?
Completely. Every step runs in your browser using WebAssembly codecs, so there is no server cost for us to pass on. No sign-up, no watermark, no cap on how many images or how many sizes. The Pro plan adds AI tools and AVIF output; social resizing stays free.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. Decoding, face detection, cropping, resizing and ZIP creation all happen on your device. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored on our side and nothing needs deleting afterwards — which is what makes this usable for client work and unreleased campaign material.
Does resizing for social media reduce quality?
Downscaling is the safe direction and this tool uses Lanczos resampling, which preserves detail better than the simpler filters most browsers apply by default. The real risk is starting too small: exporting a 1080-pixel image to a 2560-pixel YouTube banner means enlarging, and enlargement cannot add detail that was never captured. Start from the largest original you have.
What is the safe area, and why do my Stories get covered?
A 1080 × 1920 Story is full-screen, and the platform draws its own interface on top of it: your profile and name across the top, and reply controls, captions and buttons across the bottom. Roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels are contested. Keep text and faces in the middle band and use the outer regions for background, or the app will place a Send button over your headline.
Should I export as JPG, PNG or WebP?
The tool picks a sensible output format from your source, keeping PNG where transparency needs preserving and using a lossy format where it does not. For social specifically the choice matters less than people expect, because every platform re-encodes what you upload anyway. What does matter is uploading at the full recommended dimensions, so the platform's own compression starts from a large, clean image.
Why do platforms keep changing their image sizes?
Because the surfaces change. A new full-screen video format, a redesigned profile page or a different feed layout all move the goalposts, and the recommended dimensions follow. That is exactly why the size table on this page is generated from the presets the tool actually exports rather than written into an article: when a preset is updated, the documentation updates with it instead of quietly becoming wrong.