Recommended YouTube Banner Size - Complete Guide (2022)

Your YouTube banner is the first thing someone sees when they visit your channel. Much like a Facebook cover photo, it takes up a huge part of the screen and tends to stick out quite a bit, so you need to make sure it looks great if you want to make a good first impression. 

This article is going to help you do just that. We’ll go through the recommended YouTube banner resolution, explain what the ‘safe area’ of your banner is and point you to the tools you need to create a YouTube banner that looks good on mobile, desktop and even Smart TVs.

What’s the best size and resolution for a YouTube banner?

Below are the technical specifications that Google provides with regards to YouTube banners: 

If those numbers seem a little confusing, don’t worry. We’ll go through that table and explain everything. 
 

What’s the Recommended YouTube Banner Size? 

YouTube says that your YouTube cover photo should have a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. 

You should take their recommendation to heart. Making your banner the recommended resolution will ensure that your image won’t be blurry, stretched, or cropped in unexpected ways when displayed on the YouTube website or any of the apps. 

The minimum image size is pretty self-explanatory. YouTube won’t allow you to use an image that’s smaller than 2048 x 1152 pixels as a banner. This shouldn’t really be a problem if you keep the recommended YouTube banner resolution in mind. 

If you already have a YouTube banner image that happens to be too small, you can try using a free image upscaling service to make it larger. This can work well for simple graphics, but the quality may vary when it comes to actual pictures.

How can I crop or design my YouTube banner to the right size? 

There are plenty of online tools that allow you to create precise designs without requiring too much knowledge. If you want something that’s easy to figure out, you can try out Canva, which should provide some handy YouTube banner templates as well. 

If you’ve used something like Adobe Photoshop before, you can create your YouTube banner using Pixlr or Photopea. These tools work in your web browser and the workflows are very similar to Adobe Photoshop. 

What is the YouTube banner Minimum Safe Area?

If you use YouTube on multiple devices, you might have noticed that the banner image is displayed differently on each platform. It’s wide on computers, narrow on mobile phone screens and downright huge on smart TVs, all without appearing distorted. 

That’s because YouTube doesn’t display the whole image on every device. It always displays the center of the image, but the areas toward the edges can be hidden depending on the platform.

The Minimum Safe Area is the 1546 x 1152 pixels part in the center of your YouTube banner that never gets cropped out. You need to make sure that important elements such as your logo or a brand tagline can all fit within the Sage Area so they don’t appear cropped out to people who are watching your videos on a mobile phone.

That doesn’t mean you should leave everything that’s outside of the safe image area blank! Try to design your YouTube banner image that makes it look good on all devices and platforms, whether it’s tiny mobile phone screens or large televisions.

YouTube Banner maximum file size and compatible formats

Lastly, the maximum file size is pretty self explanatory: YouTube won’t allow you to upload files larger than 6 MB as your banner image. To make sure your image doesn’t go over the maximum size, save it in a size efficient format such as JPEG or PNG. 

Speaking of formats, you should also keep in mind that YouTube only allows JPEG, PNG, GIF or BMP images to be used as banners.

How to change your YouTube banner 

So, you followed our guide and created your YouTube banner. Great! Now, it’s time to upload it to your channel by taking the following steps: 
 

1. Open up YouTube Studio on Desktop. You can do that by logging into your YouTube account and clicking the Your videos button on the left side of the screen. 

2. Click on Customization. Go to the Branding tab. In the Banner Image section, click on Upload and select your banner image from your computer. 

3. Use the controls in the corner to crop the image if needed and then click Done to save your brand new YouTube banner image.

How to add social media links to your YouTube banner image

If you’ve spent a fair amount of time on YouTube, you probably noticed that most channels have links to their websites and social media on their banners. You can do the same. 

Go back to the Customization menu from before and click on the Basic Info tab. Click on Add Link to add links to your social media and website. 

You can add a maximum of five links using this method. Use the mouse button to reorder your banner links by dragging on the handle to the left of each link.

To have your links show up on the banner, go to the Links on banner section and choose how many links you want to be displayed, from the drop-down list. 

The next step in your YouTube journey

Now that you've figured out how to make your channel page look good, it's time to start editing your YouTube videos. Remember that making videos is something that you can always get better at, so if you enjoyed this guide and want to learn more about other facets of YouTube, you can check out our guide on how to create engaging YouTube videos.