YouTube thumbnail size and how to make one
1280x720, under 2MB. The spec is simple; the craft is that it will be seen at 200 pixels wide.
Updated 2026-09-10
A YouTube thumbnail is 1280 by 720 pixels at 16:9. The file must be JPG, PNG, or GIF under 2MB, and at least 640 pixels wide. None of that is hard. What is hard is that the image will be seen far smaller than that.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Recommended size | 1280 x 720 |
| Minimum width | 640 pixels |
| Ratio | 16:9 |
| Format | JPG, PNG, GIF |
| File size | Under 2MB |
| Requirement | Phone-verified channel |
The size it is actually seen at
You build it at 1280x720, but nobody sees it that way. On the phone home feed it fills most of the width, but in the recommended list beside a playing video it is 170 to 210 pixels wide, and in search results around 360. That is a sixth of the original. Text that cannot be read at that size may as well not exist.
Shrink the finished thumbnail to 200 pixels wide in a browser and look at it. You should be able to tell what the video is about. Most thumbnails fail this test — too many words, a face too small, or nothing that separates from the background.
What gets covered
- Bottom right: the duration badge, covering roughly 230x115 pixels at 1280x720. Keep faces and text out of it.
- Bottom edge: on videos already watched, a red progress bar runs along it.
- The four corners: search results and channel pages round them off. Keep anything important 20 pixels in from the edge.
A thumbnail that reads small
- Six words at most. Do not repeat the title; say the one thing the title does not.
- Type at least 100 pixels tall, in a heavy sans serif. Thin fonts vanish at 200 pixels.
- A face at least half the frame height. A face with an expression catches the eye before any text.
- Three elements or fewer: one face, one line of text, one background.
- Strong brightness contrast between subject and background. Light face on dark, or the reverse.
- Look at it next to your channel's other thumbnails. In a list, one channel's videos sit side by side.
Size and file weight
There is no reason to go above 1280; YouTube scales it back down. Below 640 it is rejected or scaled up and turns soft. Even for a 4K video, 1280x720 is enough for the thumbnail.
The 2MB cap bites with PNG. A 1280x720 PNG with a photo in it easily passes 2MB. Save as PNG when it is mostly text and shapes, as JPG at 90 percent when it is mostly photo. JPG at 90 percent lands around 300KB.
Shorts are different
Shorts have no separate thumbnail spec. You pick one frame from the video as the cover. The trick is to include a frame in the video that is meant to be the cover. That frame is 9:16 vertical, and it appears as a tall tile in the Shorts shelf.