1280 × 720 resize — keep the whole image

Worked example

Resize a PNG to 1280×720 for a YouTube thumbnail with contain: 1600×1000 becomes 1152×720 with 64px transparent bars left and right.

A 1280×720 thumbnail is 16:9 and is what viewers judge before they click. Thumbnails also shrink to a couple of hundred pixels wide in search and sidebars: at about 0.16 scale, 60px letters become roughly 10px, so use three or four heavy words with strong contrast rather than a sentence. The picture spans only 90% of the canvas width and the rest is transparent bars, so some of those zones land on bars rather than on your PNG content.

Contain scales the PNG by ×0.72 so the whole picture fits at 1152×720px, then fills the rest with transparent bars. The 64px bars sit on the left and right, so 90% of the canvas width is picture and nothing is cut. Choose it when the left or right edge carries something that cannot go, such as a corner logo; the 64px bars cost only 10% of the width.

With PNG the 64px bars are transparent, not white, and the file stays lossless. Platforms flatten transparency their own way, so the bars can turn black or white after posting; if the look matters, fill them with a colour first. A photo at 1280×720 commonly lands around 1 to 2.2 MB. YouTube's thumbnail upload is widely documented with a 2 MB limit, so a dense photographic PNG can exceed it; fall back to the JPG source if it does.

A gaming channel keeps a 1600×1000 PNG screenshot whole with contain, getting a 1152×720 picture with 64px bars at the sides. On YouTube's dark theme those bars look like a mistake. Choose cover instead, because only 50px of source height per edge is lost, unless a corner logo must stay. A PNG of this kind is around 1 to 2.2 MB; if the upload is slow or refused, that weight is the usual cause, not the 1280×720 pixel size.

Confirm 1280×720 and keep the file under 2 MB, then shrink the preview to about 200px wide, read it, and cover the lower-right 150×60px with your thumb to see what the duration badge would hide. Look at the bars next to your neighbouring posts to see whether their colour belongs. The file is saved as name-preset.png; open it in a viewer with a checkerboard background to confirm what is transparent, and compare the size with the estimate above.

1600 × 1000 px · PNG

1280 × 720 px · PNG

PNG at 1280×720: the 64px transparent bars apply to a 1600×1000 source; a platform may flatten transparency to black or white.