YouTube Banner Safe Area Preview
One banner, four crops — and the 1546×423 window that decides the design.
- 2 runs
- ~1 ms
- 100% success
Tool input
Overview
About this tool
Draws a 2560×1440 channel banner with each device’s crop shaded over it: television, desktop, tablet and phone. Paste your image URL to see your own artwork under the crops, measured against YouTube’s canvas.
Instructions
How to use it
Paste a direct link to the image you plan to upload — or to a channel’s existing banner — and each device’s crop is drawn over it to scale. Leave the field blank to see the geometry on its own.
The numbers
- Upload 2560 × 1440. That is YouTube’s canvas, and the file has to come in under 6 MB.
- Television shows all of it. The only surface that does.
- Desktop shows 2560 × 423 — a strip through the middle.
- Tablet shows 1855 × 423.
- Phones show 1546 × 423, which is 17% of the file you uploaded.
Design the smallest window first
Every element that has to be read — the channel name, the face, the upload schedule — belongs inside the 1546 × 423 centre. Everything outside it is décor for a device almost nobody is using. Designing outward from that rectangle is the whole trick, and designing inward from 2560 is why so many channels have a wordmark cut in half on a phone.
Questions
Frequently asked
What size should a YouTube banner be?
2560 × 1440 pixels, under 6 MB. That is the upload canvas; every device then crops it, and the smallest crop — 1546 × 423 on phones — is the one that decides where your text can go.
Why does my banner look cut off on mobile?
Because it is. A phone shows a 1546 × 423 window from the centre of a 2560 × 1440 file, discarding 83% of it. Anything you placed outside that window was never going to appear.
Can I upload a smaller image?
YouTube will accept it and scale it up, which is what makes a banner look soft on a television while looking acceptable on a phone. Export at 2560 × 1440 and the problem does not arise.
Does the tool store my image?
No. It fetches the URL to measure the file’s dimensions and draws the crops over that same URL. Nothing is uploaded to us and nothing is kept.
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