Free · No signup · Nothing uploaded

See your thumbnail on YouTube before you publish

Drop in a thumbnail, type your title, and see the exact card viewers get — home feed, search, suggested, mobile and TV, in dark and light mode. Including where your title gets cut off.

Drop your thumbnail here
click to browse — or paste ⌘V

0/100
Channel name & metadata (optional — sensible defaults)

YouTube cuts titles by pixel width, not character count — wide letters clip sooner. These mockups use YouTube's real layout rules, so what fits here fits there.

Home feedDesktop
Search resultsDesktop
SuggestedDesktop · watch page
Home feedMobile
Home shelfTV
Videos tabChannel page

Why this exists

Judge it where viewers judge it: in the feed.

A thumbnail that looks great full-screen in your editor competes at postage-stamp size against everyone else's best work. We wanted one page that answers the only two questions that matter before publishing — does it stand out, and does the title survive the cut? So we built it, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, nothing is watermarked.

Questions

Quick answers

Is this YouTube thumbnail tester free?

Yes — completely free, no account, no upload limits, no watermarks. We built it for our own publishing workflow and put it on the site as-is.

What size should a YouTube thumbnail be?

1280×720 pixels (16:9 ratio), under 2MB, as a JPG, PNG or WebP. This tool warns you if your image isn't 16:9 or is lower resolution than 1280 pixels wide.

How long can a YouTube title be before it gets cut off?

YouTube allows 100 characters, but most surfaces clip titles well before that — often around 55–70 characters depending on the surface and the width of the letters you use. That's exactly what the truncation report above shows you, per surface.

Do you upload or store my thumbnail?

No. Your image never leaves your browser — the previews are rendered locally on your device. Refresh the page and it's gone.

From the same workshop

Want the system behind tools like this?

We build our own tools and systems, then show the work. The free Operator's Map is the starting point — how AI goes from a chat window to agents, teams and whole systems you run.

Free guide, regular updates, no spam. Unsubscribe anytime.