YouTube Thumbnail Generator
Create a 1280×720 YouTube thumbnail from an image, title, and subtitle.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How is the thumbnail laid out?
Your image is scaled to cover the full 1280×720 frame and cropped from the centre. A dark gradient runs across it from left to right: 78 percent black at the left edge, 28 percent at 704 pixels in and 6 percent at the right, which keeps left-aligned text readable on bright photos. Near the top left sits a 170×16 accent bar, and a WATCH NOW button in the accent color is always drawn at the bottom left, from 80 to 380 pixels across and 596 to 654 down.
The title is set in heavy 86-pixel Arial (Helvetica or a generic sans-serif where Arial is missing), starting 130 pixels from the top with lines 94 pixels apart. It wraps at 760 pixels wide for left or right alignment and 1,040 when centred, and stops after four lines; words beyond the fourth line are dropped without a warning. The subtitle is 36 pixels, starts 20 pixels below the title block, is also limited to four lines and always uses a cream color (#F8F7EC), whatever the Text color setting.
How much text fits before it hits the button?
A four-line title ends at 506 pixels, so the subtitle starts at 526. Its second line then runs from 572 to about 608, which overlaps the top of the WATCH NOW button at 596 when the text is left-aligned. A three-line title with a two-line subtitle finishes around 514 and stays clear.
Right alignment ends the text 80 pixels from the right edge, and YouTube overlays the video length on the bottom-right corner of thumbnails in its feeds, so keep long subtitles out of that area. After changing text or colors, press Generate thumbnail again; the preview keeps showing the previous result until you do.
What background image works best?
Use a landscape image of at least 1280×720. A 640×480 picture is enlarged two times to cover the frame and loses 60 of its own pixels from the top and the bottom, so it looks soft. Shot upright, a 1080×1920 phone photo keeps only its middle 608 rows or so, about 32 percent of its height, so frame the subject near the middle. Uploads can be PNG, JPG or WebP, and the result is a JPG at 92 percent quality saved as youtube-thumbnail.jpg.
To study the thumbnails of existing videos, the YouTube Thumbnail Downloader fetches any public video's thumbnail in up to five sizes.