YouTube Thumbnail Safe-Zone Overlay
The timestamp badge in the bottom right corner covers roughly 15% of your thumbnail. Check your safe zone before you upload.
Drop your thumbnail here or browse
Supports PNG, JPG and WebP (recommended: 1280×720px)
No thumbnail loaded
Your epic video title in the YouTube feed preview...
Your Channel Name
145K views • 2 days ago
Your epic video title in the YouTube feed preview...
Your Channel Name • 145K views • 2 days ago
Settings
What the safe zone is
YouTube draws its own interface elements on top of your thumbnail in the feed. You upload a clean 1280x720 image, but viewers never see all of it. The bottom right corner carries the duration badge, the bottom edge can carry a red progress bar for videos the viewer already started, and live streams get a red LIVE label in the same corner.
The safe zone is the part of the frame that survives all of that. The overlay on this page marks the opposite: the danger zone in the bottom right, where your own content is most likely to be covered. Toggle it in the settings panel and move anything important out of it.
- Duration badge: bottom right, sized to the runtime. "1:15:30" is noticeably wider than "9:58".
- LIVE badge: bottom right, solid red, replaces the duration on live streams and premieres.
- Progress bar: a red line along the bottom edge for partially watched videos.
- Channel avatar and title sit below the image rather than on it, but they still compete for attention.
The badge is not always the same width
This is the trap most creators miss. If you check your layout against a short timestamp like 8:42 and then publish a 90-minute video, the badge grows to something like 1:15:30 and eats a wider strip of the corner. Text that cleared the short badge can end up half hidden behind the long one.
Use the badge selector to cycle through Short, Long and LIVE. Whatever your longest planned video is, test against that. If you stream, test the LIVE badge too: it is a solid red block that pulls the eye away from your own design.
Where to put your text instead
The bottom right is the worst place for text. In practice the strongest positions are the left third and the upper half of the frame, which stay clear of every overlay YouTube adds. If your design needs text low in the frame, keep it on the left and leave the right corner to YouTube.
Watch the very bottom edge as well. Text sitting flush against it can be clipped by the progress bar for anyone who already started the video, which is exactly the audience you most want to bring back.
Frequently asked questions
How much of a YouTube thumbnail does the timestamp cover?
The badge itself is small, but it sits in the bottom right corner and its width scales with the duration text. Treat roughly the bottom right eighth of the frame as unusable, and more if your videos run over an hour. The overlay on this page marks a deliberately generous danger zone so you keep a margin.
Does the duration badge appear everywhere?
It appears on essentially every surface where a duration makes sense: home feed, search results, suggested videos and the desktop sidebar. Live streams show a red LIVE badge in the same spot instead, and Shorts are a separate format without a duration badge.
What about the red progress bar?
YouTube draws a thin red bar along the bottom edge of the thumbnail for videos a viewer has partially watched. It only appears for that viewer, but it will clip anything flush against the bottom of your image. You can toggle it in the settings panel.
Is there an official safe-zone template from YouTube?
YouTube publishes the technical requirements (1280x720, 16:9, under 2 MB) but no official safe-zone template for the badge overlay. That is why an overlay preview is useful: you check your actual image against the actual interface instead of guessing from a spec sheet.