1280 × 720 resize — center crop

Worked example

Resize a PNG to 1280×720 for a YouTube thumbnail with center crop: 1600×1000 becomes 1280×800, 40px cut top and bottom.

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 crop fills the whole 1280×720 frame, so those zones sit on real picture content; check that nothing you need in the PNG lands under them.

Center crop scales the PNG by ×0.8 until it fills the frame, then trims 40px from the top and from the bottom of the canvas. That keeps the central 900px of the source height (90%), so 50px at each top and bottom edge of the original is gone for good. It is the natural choice for nearly any landscape source because only a thin strip is lost, as long as nothing important touches the top or bottom edge.

PNG is lossless, so the crop adds no compression artifacts and any transparency in the source survives. The price is size: a photographic PNG at 1280×720 commonly lands around 1 to 2.2 MB, several times a JPG, while flat graphics in solid colours stay far smaller. 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 cooking channel turns a 1600×1000 PNG frame into a thumbnail: ×0.8 scale with 40px lost at the top and bottom. A title typed 30px below the top edge of the source is sliced in half. Keep text at least 60px from the top and bottom of the source before you resize. 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. Compare with the original side by side to see exactly what the crop removed. 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 40px trim is geometry for a 1600×1000 source; a different source ratio changes it, and the tool does not warn you before it cuts.