Resize Image for a YouTube Thumbnail (1280x720)

YouTube's rules for a custom thumbnail are short: 1280 by 720 pixels, a 16:9 ratio, a minimum width of 640, a JPG, PNG or GIF file under 2 MB. This page is preset to that first number and, unlike most resize jobs, it forces the exact dimensions rather than fitting inside them, because a thumbnail that comes out 1280 by 960 is not a thumbnail.

That forced setting has a consequence worth knowing before you drop a file in. A photo that is already 16:9 is resized without any distortion. A square image, a vertical phone photo or a 4:3 shot is stretched to fill the frame, and faces stretched sideways are the fastest way to make a video look amateur. For those, crop to 16:9 first with the Crop Image tool, then come back here.

Resizing fixes dimensions, not weight. A PNG with large flat areas of colour is usually small, but a detailed photo exported as PNG can pass 2 MB, in which case the Compress Image tool brings it down. One design note: the lower right corner is covered by the duration badge, and on phones the whole image is shown about as wide as a thumb, so large text and one clear subject beat clever detail. The resizing runs in your browser; the image is never uploaded.