YouTube thumbnail : how to get a picture of the good size without Photoshop?

For YouTube, the ideal thumbnail size is 1280 × 720 pixels, and the ideal ratio for YouTube players and previews is 16:9.

Some recommended formats are JPG, GIF or PNG.

To get an image with 1280 × 720 pixels, you have two possibilities:

- Solution 1 – find the correct size directly from a stock photos.

- Solution 2 – find a picture that you like and crop it to 1280 × 720 pixels.

Solution 1 – Find directly a stock photography website with 1280 × 720 pixels pictures.

The website mocah.org has a wide choice pictures.

This website has the options to resize his pictures with a list of predefined size, like 1280 × 720 pixels. You just have to click on "resize picture" bellow the picture itself.

Solution 2 - find a picture that you like and crop it to 1280 × 720 pixels.

If you don’t have a picture editor like Photoshop, you can use a free website like Adobe Express.

The big disadvantage is that using an online photo editor is slower than to have an offline software.

If you have a lot of pictures to resize the fastest way to crop a bulk of pictures is to write a program.

For example in Python there is the Python Imaging Library (PIL). It’s a free and open-source additional library for the Python programming language.

You can crop an image with this 4 lines of code:

from PIL import Image
im = Image.open("image1.jpg")
im1 = im.crop((0, 150, 1280, 870))
im1.save("image2.jpg", "JPEG", optimize=True)