Banner Safe Area Checker
One banner, several crops. Drop your image, tick the devices you care about, and the region every one of them shows is outlined while everything they cut is dimmed. Save the marked-up version and hand it to whoever is laying the artwork out.
Banner and the devices that crop it
YouTube wants one 2560x1440 image of 6MB or less, and crops that single file per device rather than asking for four. Check any file here, then export within YouTube’s limit.
Drop your banner
One file at a time, up to 50.0 MB — this page’s own decoding limit, not the platform’s. It is decoded and composited in this tab and never uploaded.
Nothing loaded yet. Drop an image above — it is composited inside this browser tab and never uploaded.
Lay the banner out against the safe area
Knowing the rectangle is half of it. Moda is where the artwork gets designed around it.
Try Moda free →One upload, four completely different pictures
YouTube channel art is the clearest case in the whole category and the reason this page exists. You upload a single 2560x1440 image and YouTube never shows it whole to anyone except a television. A desktop browser shows a 2560x423 strip through the middle. A tablet shows 1855x423. A phone shows 1546x423. Nothing is resized to fit — the extra is simply cropped away — so a channel name that reads perfectly on the artwork you exported can be entirely outside the phone crop, which is where most of your subscribers will see it. The 1546x423 rectangle in the middle is the only part that reaches every device, and it is about 18 percent of the image you upload.
Design the middle, decorate the edges
The practical rule that follows is not "design smaller". It is that the frame has two jobs. Everything a viewer needs — the channel name, a face, a tagline, a schedule, a logo — belongs inside the safe rectangle, at a size that survives being shown a few hundred pixels wide on a phone. Everything outside it should be texture: gradient, pattern, a continuation of the background, an image that reads fine when its outer third is missing. That way the television version looks deliberately expansive instead of looking like the phone version with dead space around it, and the phone version does not look like a fragment.
Where the numbers come from, and which ones to trust
YouTube publishes its four crop sizes, so those are exact and are marked as such here. The X header and Facebook cover figures are not published: they are measured from the layouts those apps render today, they are marked approximate on the page, and both platforms change them without any announcement. Treat them as a guide with a margin rather than a specification. The one to watch on X is not the crop at all but the profile picture, which is drawn over the lower left of the header on every surface and is the most common reason a logo placed in that corner disappears.
What to do with the check image
The marked-up frame downloads as a PNG at the full upload size, which makes it a working document rather than a screenshot. Drop it into whatever you are designing in as a locked bottom layer and the safe rectangle becomes a guide you can position against, at the same scale as the artwork. It is also the fastest way to settle an argument with whoever supplied the banner: a sentence about a 1546-pixel safe area is abstract, and a picture of their logo sitting outside it is not. If what you are checking is artwork that is already composed rather than a photograph, use fit and pad so you see it whole instead of pre-cropped.
Frequently asked questions
What size should YouTube channel art be?
2560x1440 pixels, under 6MB, with everything that matters inside the centred 1546x423 rectangle. Those are YouTube's own numbers rather than a convention. Uploading smaller than 2560x1440 means the television and desktop crops get upscaled, which is where soft, blocky banners come from; uploading a different aspect ratio means YouTube picks the crop instead of you.
Why does my banner look fine on desktop and wrong on my phone?
Because the phone crop is a full 1000 pixels narrower than the desktop one, and it takes those pixels off both sides. Anything sitting in the outer fifth of the width — which is exactly where people put logos and social handles — is present on desktop and absent on mobile. Tick only the mobile surface on this page and the outline shows you what is left.
Is my banner uploaded to check it?
No, and the reason it can work that way is that the crops are data rather than a service: the rectangles are a table in the page, so checking a banner against them is arithmetic plus one canvas draw, both of which your browser does. Nothing is sent anywhere, which matters when the banner announces something that has not been announced yet.
Can I check a banner that is not one of these three?
Not directly — the frames offered are the ones whose crops are known well enough to be worth drawing. If you know the crop your surface applies, the general image cropper will cut to it, and the technique generalises without the tool: export at the full upload size, then check that everything essential sits inside the smallest crop any of your surfaces uses.
How does this differ from the story safe zone checker?
They solve opposite problems that look similar. A banner is cropped: the device shows less of your image than you uploaded, and the question is what is still in frame. A story is not cropped at all — the app draws its own buttons, captions and profile bar on top of a full-size image, and the question is what is still visible under the interface. Different failure, different rectangles, different page.