YouTube finally increase thumbnail size to 50MB (from 2MB), but only on PC

Overnight YouTube CEO Neal Mohan shared that YouTube Creators can now upload thumbnails up to 50 MB in size, a 2500% increase.

This has been a long running frustration on the platform, and really inconsistent with the platform supporting up to 8K video uploads of many GB in size.

The increase thumbnail quality will should look great on larger displays, however some video apps, like those embedded on TVs may require an update to support the larger thumbnails.

Another detail that is important to point out, is information from YouTube’s support documentation, under the heading ‘custom thumbnail best practices’, which lists the limits depend on the device you’re using to upload your thumbnail.

• Mobile: 2 MB for video thumbnails or 10 MB for podcasts.
• Desktop: 50MB for both video thumbnails and podcast thumbnails.

So while the increase in thumbnail file size is definitely welcome and long overdue, there’s still a gap here, in that those mobile creators are still stuck at 2MB.

It’s common for creators to edit their thumbnails before uploading, but lets consider another common scenario, that someone captures a video, shares it to YouTube, captures a photo on their phone and attempts to use that as their thumbnail. Directly off a modern smartphone camera, photos are regularly 5-10MB in size, meaning this is still likely to be an issue for some.

There’s no real reason for YouTube to have a restriction like this, so let’s hope they make it consistently 50MB across the board.

Creators will certainly appreciate a smoother workload, removing combersome steps in the workflow like optimising the thumbnail image to reduce the size in order to fit under an arbritary limit will help more creators get more content to the platform, more often.