I Built a Free Safe-Area Checker for YouTube Banners

If you have ever uploaded a YouTube banner and watched it get quietly hacked in half on mobile, this post is for you.

I run a small free tool at , which is the only place Google publishes the crop coordinates.

The mistake everyone makes

The single most common failure I have seen across hundreds of submitted banners is this: designers lay out the entire banner at full 2560 x 1440, then upload, then wonder why mobile only shows the middle 31%.

It feels counterintuitive: you tell them "2560 x 1440" and they treat the entire canvas as design real estate. Design and layout software happily puts text at the edges. YouTube happily accepts the upload. But the upload and the rendered display are two different crops, and there is no warning until your viewers quietly do not see half your content.

The tool I shipped

I built a free .

Try the checker

If you have a banner ready, drop it into vidthumb.co — you will see all three rectangles overlaid in under a second. If something important is outside the safe area, the overlay shows you exactly where, and which devices it disappears on.

No signup, no email, no analytics fingerprinting. Just the rectangles on your image.

If this saved you a re-upload cycle, I would love a heart or a follow. I write about the small, mostly-boring details of running a single-developer SaaS in the open.