Expand a photo

YouTube thumbnail size, without cropping

Turn any picture into a 1280×720 YouTube thumbnail without cropping.

or drop a photo here · paste works too

A screenshot, a phone photo or a frame grab — any shape works.

  • Free
  • No sign-up
  • Photos stay on your device
A tall portrait expanded to 16:9 with blurred edges on both sides and nothing cropped.
The photo before it was expandedBefore
After Tall photo → 16:9 · blurred edges

For this conversion the model is not offered: it would need about 1,166 new columns on each side and there is not enough photograph beside them. Blurred cover is the honest answer here, and it is already selected.

Measured on a 1080 x 1920 phone still: a 3,413 x 1,920 canvas, 1,166 new columns a side. Open your own photograph and the rail recomputes all of it against that file. It will not invent a room, a horizon of buildings, the rest of a body or a face. Past the depth it can reach it does not fail loudly — it produces a smooth, confident, wrong picture — which is why the ceiling is in the interface rather than in a warning. Every limit, in one table.

Any picture into a 16:9 thumbnail — 1280 × 720, 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160 — by fitting it whole and building the edges. The duration-badge corner is marked on the canvas.

Opens at 1280 × 720 with a blurred cover and the bottom-right corner marked where the length badge sits. The chips switch size; “For upload from a phone” sets a 2 MB cap.

Two photos, two verdicts on the model

From a 1080 x 1920 phone still: For this conversion the model is not offered: it would need about 1,166 new columns on each side and there is not enough photograph beside them. Blurred cover is the honest answer here, and it is already selected.

From a 4032 x 3024 phone photo (4:3): For this conversion the model is within reach: about 672 new columns on each side, 6 passes of about 15 seconds in total, after a one-time download you have to agree to. Blurred cover is what the page starts on, and it needs no download at all.

What each photo becomes at thumbnail size

Computed by this site's own geometry — photo fitted whole, edges built
PhotoPhoto drawn atBuilt
Vertical phone still, 1080 × 1920405 × 720 (37.5%)68%
4:3 phone photo, 4032 × 3024960 × 720 (23.8%)25%
4:3 phone photo at 1920 × 10801,440 × 1,080 (35.7%)25%
Square image, 1080 × 1080720 × 720 (66.7%)44%

The awkward questions

What size should a YouTube thumbnail be?

YouTube Help asks for 16:9 with a minimum width of 640 pixels, and recommends 3840 × 2160 — “as large as possible”. 1280 × 720 clears the minimum and is what most people upload. The chips here give 1280 × 720, 1920 × 1080 and 3840 × 2160; the photo is fitted inside whichever you pick and the rest of the frame is built.

My photo is vertical. Will it be cropped to 16:9?

No. A vertical photo goes in whole, in the middle, and the sides are filled — blurred cover to start, because two thirds of a frame is a lot to build and a soft backdrop carries it best. The model is not offered for this one; the line above the drop zone says why, with the numbers.

What is the box in the bottom-right corner?

Where YouTube prints the video's length over the thumbnail. It is drawn on the canvas so you keep faces and text out of it; it is never saved into the file. We observed it rather than read it in a specification, and it is labelled that way.

Is there a file-size limit?

YouTube Help gives 2 MB for thumbnails uploaded from the phone app and 50 MB from a computer. Pick “For upload from a phone” and the page aims the JPG at 2 MB or less, lowering quality first and saying what it did.

Can I add text to the thumbnail here?

No — this page shapes the picture and stops there. Grow one side a little more than the other (drag that edge) and you have a quiet band for the title you add in your editor.

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