Free · no signup · nothing uploaded

YouTube thumbnail preview

See your thumbnail in the home feed, in search, in the sidebar and on a phone, next to real videos, before you publish. Upload the image or paste a link. It all happens in your browser.

Upload the thumbnail you haven't published yet (1280×720 JPG or PNG), or paste a live video to test its current one. Drag and drop works too. Nothing is uploaded to us: the image stays in your browser.

0/100 · YouTube cuts titles at 2 lines in the feed

19:27

Last Cheater Standing Wins $10,000!

Mark Rober

10M views

Paste a link or upload an image to see your thumbnail here
yours

Your title goes here — keep it under 60 characters

Your channel

1.2K views · 2 hours ago

25:13

I Survived The Most Extreme Places On Earth

MrBeast

110.3M views

29:14

A Physics Professor Bet Me $10,000 I'm Wrong...

Veritasium

2.9M views

14:47

How North Korea Became the World’s Most Isolated Country

The Infographics Show

293K views

20:02

Dropbox Was Worth $10 Billion. Then Everyone Left

ColdFusion

613K views

22:41

I Built A City To Save Kids From Illegal Labor

MrBeast

48.5M views

21:33

How to lose $35 Billion Dollars Betting on AI

ColdFusion

1.1M views

16:58

Why Do People Pass Out On Roller Coasters?

Mark Rober

6.7M views

The other videos are real, recent uploads from large channels; their thumbnails load straight from YouTube. Views and dates are from when the list was last refreshed. The layout copies YouTube's dimensions and type sizes as of 2026, and YouTube changes them now and then.

What to check before you publish

A thumbnail is judged in half a second, at a fraction of the size you designed it, next to videos with millions of views. Test for that, not for how it looks full-screen in Photoshop.

Readable at 360 pxThat is roughly the width of a thumbnail in the home feed on a laptop. If the text needs the full 1280 px to read, it will never be read.
Three words, maximumText on a thumbnail is a label, not a title. The title already sits under it. Say something the title does not say, or say nothing.
One subject, bigA face, an object, a number. Fill the frame. Detail that looks great in your editor turns into noise at feed size.
Contrast with the neighboursMove it around the grid with "Move mine". If it blends into the row, change the dominant colour, not the layout.
Check it blurredTurn on the squint test. Thumbnails that survive a blur are the ones people notice while scrolling.
Check it on mobileMost watch time is on phones. The mobile tab shows the thumbnail full-width with the title under it, which is how most of your audience meets it.
Check both themesHalf of YouTube runs in dark mode. A dark thumbnail with a black border disappears on a black page.

Why is this free?

It runs in your browser

YouTube serves thumbnails and video titles from public endpoints that any page can read. The mock feed is HTML and CSS. There is no server on our side doing anything, so there is nothing to charge for.

No signup, no watermark

Paid thumbnail tools mostly sell an account, a saved history and a "CTR score" that is a guess. You do not need any of that to see whether the picture works.

Built by people who make thumbnails

Elevate is a community for faceless YouTube channels. We test our own thumbnails this way, so we built the page we wanted.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to upload my video first?

No. Upload the thumbnail image itself (the 1280×720 JPG or PNG you would give YouTube) and type the title. That is the point: test it before it is public. If the video is already live, paste its link and the tool reads the current thumbnail and title.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The image is read by your browser and drawn into the mock feed on your screen. It never leaves your computer, there is no account, and we keep nothing.

Where do the other videos come from?

They are real, recent uploads from large channels. Their thumbnails load directly from YouTube's image servers when the page opens, so they are always the real files. They are there to give you honest neighbours, not to rank your video.

What size should a YouTube thumbnail be?

1280×720 pixels, 16:9, under 2 MB, as JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP. Anything narrower than 640 pixels gets rejected. Design at 1280×720 but judge it at the size in this tool: in the feed it is displayed at about 360 pixels wide, on a phone often less.

What is the squint test?

Blur the feed and see which thumbnails still stand out. Most viewers decide in under a second and never look closely, so a thumbnail that only works when you can read it is losing. If yours disappears when blurred, simplify: one subject, bigger, more contrast against the neighbours.

Why does the pasted video show a lower-quality thumbnail?

YouTube only publishes the full 1280×720 version for videos that were uploaded with a custom thumbnail at that size. If a video only has the auto-generated one, the tool falls back to the 480-pixel version, which is what the feed shows anyway.

Does this tell me which thumbnail will get more clicks?

No tool can, and the ones that give you a score are guessing. YouTube itself now lets you A/B test up to three thumbnails on a published video (Test & compare in Studio). Use this page to pick the candidates that look right in context, then let real viewers decide.

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Built by Elevate — a community for people building faceless YouTube channels.