YouTube thumbnail size
What YouTube actually asks for, in their own words, and what their interface covers up afterwards.
The short answer
Upload 1280 × 720 or larger at 16:9, as a JPG or PNG. That is the number everyone quotes and it is fine — but it is not what YouTube recommends, and the difference matters on a 4K television.
What YouTube asks for
Every figure above is quoted from YouTube's own help page and dated. If they change it and we have not noticed within six months, our build fails rather than this page going stale.
Why everyone says 1280 × 720
1280 × 720 is the smallest size that looks right at every place YouTube shows a thumbnail, so it became the default answer years ago and stuck. YouTube's own recommendation is four times that in each direction. In practice a 1280 × 720 thumbnail is sharp on a phone and on a laptop, and visibly soft on a large screen — which is where a growing share of watch time now happens. If you are producing the image anyway, produce it bigger.
The parts YouTube covers up
A thumbnail is never shown on its own. YouTube paints its own interface on top of it, and anything you put underneath is gone:
- The bottom-right corner carries the duration badge on every video. Put text there and it is either hidden or stacked behind a black pill.
- The bottom edge carries the red progress bar once someone has started watching, so a headline sitting on the baseline gets a line through it.
- On Shorts, the bottom quarter and the right edge belong to the caption, the channel handle and the action buttons. A vertical cover has far less usable room than its pixel count suggests.
This is also why a generated thumbnail should never draw a duration badge, a play button or a progress bar of its own. YouTube adds the real ones, and you end up with two.
The three shapes worth having
A vertical cover is not a horizontal one cropped. The safe areas move, the text budget shrinks and the framing changes, so each needs composing for its own shape.
1280 × 720
16:9
The classic thumbnail, on the watch page, the home feed and search.
1080 × 1920
9:16
Shorts, Reels and TikTok covers, where the interface eats the bottom quarter.
1080 × 1080
1:1
Community posts, podcast artwork and anywhere a feed crops to a square.
Generate one at the right size
All three shapes, rendered natively rather than cropped from a 16:9 original.
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