YouTube Thumbnail Maker
Make a YouTube thumbnail online for free: your photo, a bold headline and a cutout, saved at 1280x720 ready to upload.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Make a YouTube thumbnail online for free: your photo, a bold headline and a cutout, saved at 1280x720 ready to upload.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
This free thumbnail maker builds the picture people see before they click your video. Pick a background photo, type a headline and choose one of four styles: Classic (white letters with a thick black outline and a drop shadow), Comic (bold yellow comic lettering), Box (white words on a coloured highlight bar) or Glow (neon letters). Drag the headline where it reads best, pull the round corner handle to make it bigger and turn it with the handle above it. Drag the photo itself to move it inside the frame and use Zoom to crop in closer. The Text and Outline swatches change the colours, so the headline can match your channel.
Most thumbnails that get clicked show a face or the thing the video is about. Add image puts a second picture on top of the background, with the same move, scale and rotate handles as the text. A PNG with a transparent background works best: cut yourself out of a photo first with the /background-remover/, then add the result here so it stands in front of the scene with a soft shadow. Remove image takes it off again.
YouTube recommends thumbnails of 1280 x 720 pixels in a 16:9 frame, and that is exactly what this tool exports, whatever the size of your photo. The download is a JPG kept under YouTube's upload limit, so it is ready for YouTube Studio as it is. PNG is there too if you want a lossless copy for editing later. You can also copy the thumbnail to the clipboard or share it straight from your phone.
To look at the thumbnail of a video that is already online, use the /youtube-thumbnail-viewer/. For a general caption on any photo, /add-text-to-image/ has more fonts and free text boxes.
Channel art often shows a video before it is public: an unreleased product, a guest, a face. This thumbnail creator draws everything on a canvas in your browser, so your photos and your headline never leave your device and nothing is uploaded to a server. There is no account, no watermark and no limit on how many thumbnails you make.
1280 x 720 pixels, a 16:9 frame, with a minimum width of 640 pixels. This maker always exports 1280 x 720, and a photo in any other shape is filled into the frame so there are no black bars; drag it and use Zoom to choose what shows.
JPG keeps a photo thumbnail small enough for YouTube's upload limit while looking the same on screen. The tool lowers the JPG quality a little only if a very detailed picture would not fit otherwise. PNG is in the format menu, but a detailed photo saved as PNG can be too big for YouTube.
Yes. Choose Start without a photo on the first screen and the headline sits on a colour gradient; the Background swatch changes its colour. You can add a photo later with Add background photo.
No. The photo, the cutout and the headline are combined in your browser, and the finished thumbnail is created on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere, so an unreleased video stays private until you publish it.