Tools / Thumbnail Preview Simulator
YouTube Thumbnail Preview Simulator
Thumbnail tester: preview your thumbnail with your title in YouTube search, the home feed, the suggested sidebar and on mobile, in light and dark mode.
JPG or PNG, 16:9. YouTube recommends 3840×2160; the minimum is 640 px wide.
Your image stays in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Upload a thumbnail to see it in each layout. Until then, the layouts show an empty 16:9 frame.
Search results
How I grew my channel to 100K subscribers in one year
1.2M views · 2 days ago
Your Channel
Home feed
How I grew my channel to 100K subscribers in one year
Your Channel · 1.2M views · 2 days ago
Mobile feed
How I grew my channel to 100K subscribers in one year
Your Channel · 1.2M views · 2 days ago
Suggested sidebar
How I grew my channel to 100K subscribers in one…
Your Channel
1.2M views · 2 days ago
Approximate layouts. YouTube truncates titles by rendered width, so real cutoffs vary.
How this works
Your image is read and shown entirely inside your browser. It is never uploaded to YTDetective or anywhere else.
The layouts are approximations of YouTube’s search, home, sidebar and mobile cards, built to help you judge legibility and title truncation. YouTube changes its interface often, so sizes and exact wording will not match pixel for pixel.
Title cutoffs are rule-of-thumb character counts. YouTube truncates by rendered width, so a title with wide letters may be cut earlier than shown, and one with narrow letters later.
The file checks (JPG or PNG, 16:9, at least 640 pixels wide, up to 2 MB from the mobile app or 50 MB from a computer) follow YouTube Help's custom-thumbnail requirements as checked on 2026-09-20 and may change.
Related guides
- YouTube Thumbnail A/B Test: How Test & Compare Works →
- How to Get Your First 1,000 YouTube Subscribers →
- How to Download a YouTube Thumbnail: What to Watch For →
- YouTube SEO Checklist: Titles, Tags and Hashtags →
- YouTube Title and Description Length Limits →
- YouTube Banner Size and Safe Area for Channel Art →
- YouTube Thumbnail Size and Safe Zones in 2026 →
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