Learn Photo Editor Tutorials

How to Batch Resize YouTube Thumbnails

By Rach DePaoli | Photo Editor Tutorials

YouTube thumbnails seem easy enough to create, along with YouTube banners. You just find out the correct aspect ratio, make your design, and upload it to the platform. While many tutorials tell you how to make YouTube channel art, what a lot of them fail to do is troubleshoot some easy issues that arise in this scenario. Most of the time when creating a YouTube thumbnail, someone will design it with a 16:9 aspect ratio, with the most popular dimension being 1920 x 1080. 

youtube thumbnail ideas

The issue that many people run into is that although this is the correct aspect ratio for YouTube, it produces too high-quality thumbnails for the size requirements. If you don’t use BeFunky’s YouTube Thumbnail Maker, you might run into these problems and find yourself Googling: “How to batch resize YouTube thumbnails online.”

BeFunky’s Batch Resizer tool is the best YouTube thumbnail resizer. Not only can you easily resize your images, but with the Batch Resizer, you can convert all of your thumbnails at once to the correct file size and dimension.

YouTube Thumbnail Sizes and Best Practices

When it comes to social media, you must know the required sizes for social media for each platform. For YouTube, that is the thumbnail size and banner size. Most people will design their YouTube thumbnails at a size of 1920 x 1080, since this is the most popular 16:9 aspect ratio.

The issue that you might run into is that YouTube also requires you to upload a photo that is under 2MB and if the elements in your design are that high of resolution, you will most likely exceed this limit. That’s why the YouTube thumbnail size in pixels that we use is 1280 x 720, which is still a 16:9 aspect ratio, but saves us on the file size. However be sure not to go lower than 640 pixels on the width, as this will make for a low-quality image.

How to Batch Resize YouTube Thumbnails Online

If you’re in the position where you designed your YouTube thumbnails at 1920 x 1080 and the file size is too large, you will need a YouTube thumbnail resizer. Unfortunately, you can’t resize your YouTube thumbnails directly on the platform, as there is no editing feature within the app. But what you can do is use our bulk image resizer to resize multiple YouTube thumbnails at once.

Let's head to the Batch Photo Editor to get started!

Step 1: Upload Your Thumbnails to the Batch Resizer

Once you’re in the Batch Photo Editor, it is time to upload your YouTube thumbnails. You can select Add Images here or drag and drop your selection of thumbnails directly into the batch processor.

upload batch resize images

Step 2: Use the Batch Resize Tool

Next, select Resize in the left-hand menu. You'll find several resizing options to choose from.

photos uploaded

For our YouTube thumbnails head to the dropdown and select Exact Size. Set the dimensions to 1280 width by 720 height. The photos will automatically resize when you set the numbers.

resize yt thumbnails

When you are finished resizing, select Apply.

Step 3: Save Your Resized YouTube Thumbnails

When you are all finished resizing, select the Save button at the top of the screen.

save yt thumbnail

From here, select JPG. I like to set my Quality to 98 – this makes the quality high, without giving you a big file size. If your file size is still over 2MB, this is what you will want to adjust to decrease it.

file quality for yt thumbnail

Once you select Save Images, another menu will appear where you can download the images. Simply select Download Images. These newly resized YouTube thumbnails will appear in your downloads in a zipped file. When you open the file, your converted thumbnails will be there.

download all images

Batch Resize Your YouTube Thumbnails With BeFunky's Batch Photo Editor

BeFunky’s Batch Image Resizer is the best and quickest YouTube thumbnail converter there is. Not only can you adjust the dimension of your design and the size of your file, but you can batch edit, crop, or apply filters to dozens of your YouTube thumbnails at once.

Photo Editing, Simplified.


Photo Editing. Simplified