YouTube Thumbnail and Banner Resizer

Pick a preset and the preview becomes a canvas of exactly that size. Your image is first fitted inside it whole, without cropping, and any empty space is filled with white. From there you can:

• zoom with the slider or the mouse wheel to fill the frame (this crops the edges that fall outside);
• drag the image with a mouse or a finger to choose which part stays in view;
• turn the image left or right in 90 degree steps;
• press Fit Image to return to the whole image centred.

The export is rendered at the preset's full pixel size from your original image, not from the smaller preview, and saved as a WebP file at quality 0.92.

A thumbnail is designed at 1280 x 720 but most people see it far smaller, in search results, sidebars and on phones. Before exporting, zoom the browser out or step back from the screen and check that the main subject and any words are still readable. Large, simple shapes and a few words in a heavy font survive shrinking much better than detailed scenes or long titles.

The time stamp of a video is usually overlaid in the bottom-right corner of the thumbnail, so avoid placing important text there.

Channel art is uploaded as one large image but displayed cropped: a wide strip on desktops, a narrower strip on phones, and the full image only on some TV apps. Keep your channel name, logo and any text in the middle of the image, both horizontally and vertically, so they survive every crop. Use the edges for background that can be cut off.

YouTube shows profile pictures as circles, so the corners of the square export are hidden. Centre the face or logo and leave a margin on all sides. For a transparent circle you control yourself, use the circle mode in the Crop tool.

• Format: the download is WebP. If a platform or scheduling tool rejects WebP uploads, convert the file with WebP to JPG.
• Background: any area your image does not cover is white. To use a coloured background instead, zoom in until the image fills the frame.
• Metadata: EXIF data, including GPS location, is not included in the exported file.
• Platform compression: social networks usually re-compress uploads. Exporting at the preset size avoids an extra resize on their side, but the final quality is still up to the platform.

The preset sizes above are the values built into this tool. Platforms change their layouts and recommendations from time to time, so if an upload looks cropped unexpectedly, check the platform's own help pages for the current size and use the Crop tool and Image Resizer to match it.

Everything is done in your browser and nothing is uploaded or sent to YouTube.