See whether YouTube will take it, and how it looks at the sizes people actually see: in the home feed, next to another video, and on a phone. Works for episode thumbnails, a podcast’s square and Shorts.
Drop your thumbnail here
JPG or PNG, like YouTube takes. WebP and GIF are checked too.
Nothing uploads
The image stays on your computer. Nothing is uploaded.
Size, shape, format and file size against what YouTube’s help pages ask for, for an episode, a podcast square or a Short.
Type your title and look at it where viewers will: a 168-pixel thumbnail next to another video is where most text stops being readable.
For a video, YouTube recommends 3840×2160 pixels at 16:9, needs at least 640 pixels across, and takes JPG or PNG. From a computer the file can be up to 50 MB, but the phone app takes only 2 MB. A podcast on YouTube also has a square thumbnail, where YouTube recommends 1280×1280 (and allows 10 MB from the phone), and Shorts use 9:16. This tool checks all three against those numbers.
A thumbnail is designed full screen and seen at a fraction of that. Next to another video it is about 168 pixels wide, and the length badge covers its bottom-right corner. Faces and two or three big words survive at that size; a guest’s name in small type doesn’t. Type your real title into the preview, since the title and the thumbnail are read together.
If your podcast is on YouTube, each episode has its own 16:9 thumbnail, and the show has a square one for its podcast page. They’re checked differently, so pick “Podcast square” above when you check the show’s artwork.
For the artwork Apple Podcasts and Spotify need, use the cover art checker. To publish the audio version of an episode, the audio extractor turns the video into an MP3 or M4A.
WizCut cuts multicam video podcasts for you: it hears who’s talking and switches to their camera. Try it on a demo episode, no signup needed.