Free YouTube thumbnail maker and podcast cover creator

What size each platform needs — and why it matters

Your thumbnail is the only part of your video everybody sees before deciding whether to click. And they almost always see it tiny: on the YouTube home page on a phone, your design is barely wider than a thumb. That is why the thumbnails that work share three things — few words, very heavy outlined type, and hard contrast between the subject and the background.

YouTube thumbnail: 1280 × 720 pixels

This is the official size and the one selected by default here. The ratio has to be 16:9 and the file has to weigh less than 2 MB. Upload something square or vertical and YouTube crops the sides. There is also furniture on top of your image: the video length sits in the bottom-right corner and the red progress bar covers the bottom edge. Keep anything important inside the central 90 percent — turn on the safe zone overlay in the editor and you can see exactly where it lands.

Podcast cover art: 3000 × 3000 pixels

Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts share the same requirements: a square RGB image, minimum 1400 × 1400 and maximum 3000 × 3000. Deliver 3000 × 3000, which is what this tool exports when you choose "Podcast cover". Cover art shows up even smaller than a YouTube thumbnail — icon-sized in a phone app — so the "few words, heavy type" rule gets stricter, not looser. The show name and almost nothing else.

Instagram and TikTok

For the square Instagram feed, 1080 × 1080 is the comfortable standard. For a TikTok cover, 1080 × 1920 vertical 9:16 — the same ratio as Reels and Shorts. If you are posting the same thing in several places, build the design once and switch the size dropdown: elements keep their relative position, and you will only need to nudge whatever sat close to an edge.

PNG or JPG: which one

If your design has big text, hard edges or flat colour — which is normal for a thumbnail — use PNG. It keeps edges clean and avoids the dirty fringing that shows up around letters. Use JPG only when the design is essentially a photograph and you need to get under 2 MB. Remember that YouTube re-compresses whatever you upload, so the better the original, the better it survives that second pass.

The cut-out trick

The composition nearly every large channel repeats is the same one: a saturated background, an enormous headline on one side, and a cut-out person pulling an exaggerated face on the other. It works because human eyes hunt for faces before anything else, and because a cut-out creates a crisp silhouette that still reads at minimum size. The cut-out tool here does exactly that: upload a photo, the tool lifts the figure off its background, and it drops in as another layer you can move, scale and rotate.

The readability score

This is the part most thumbnail makers skip. While you edit, the tool scores your design out of 100 by simulating what happens at real size: how tall your headline actually is in pixels once shrunk, how many words it carries, whether the text separates from what sits behind it, whether an outline is doing its job, and whether anything is drifting into the zone YouTube covers. It is not a decoration — the tips tell you the one thing to change next.