Troubleshooting · Blurry thumbnails
It looked sharp on your screen. In the feed it is a smear. One of five things happened, and each has a two-minute fix.
A thumbnail looks blurry on YouTube for one of five reasons: the source was smaller than 1280 pixels wide and got upscaled; the JPG was exported at a low quality setting; the text or details were too small to survive being shrunk to 168 pixels; the image was sharp but low-contrast, so compression smeared it; or the file used a colour profile YouTube flattened. Fixing the wrong one changes nothing, so diagnose first.
YouTube re-encodes every thumbnail into several sizes, and the one most viewers see is small. A design that only works at full resolution is not sharp; it is untested. The fix is to design for the small version from the start.
Open your source file and check these in order.
Check the image dimensions. Anything smaller was upscaled by YouTube, which cannot add detail. Re-export from the original design at 1280 × 720.
Blocky skin, halos around text. Re-export at quality 85–90. The file will still be far under 2 MB.
Sharp at 100%, mush at 168 px. Text needs to be at least 60–70 px tall at 1280 wide, three words maximum.
Compression eats soft edges first. Separate the subject from the background with a rim light, a shadow or a colour block.
Washed-out or shifted colours, not blur exactly. Export in sRGB; CMYK and wide-gamut profiles get flattened.
You fixed it and it still looks wrong: your app is showing the old file. Wait a few hours or check in a private window.
Because YouTube re-encodes and shrinks it. In the mobile feed a thumbnail is about 168 pixels wide — roughly an eighth of the export size. Fine detail and small text cannot survive that shrink. Design for the small version: big face, large text, strong contrast.
Yes, every upload is re-encoded into several sizes at YouTube's own compression settings. You cannot turn this off. You can only give it a source that survives it: full resolution, high contrast, no fine detail carrying the message.
Only if the blur came from over-compression of flat graphics or text edges. It will not fix small text, low resolution or low contrast, and a PNG with a photo in it often exceeds the 2 MB limit. Diagnose the cause before switching formats.
1280 × 720 pixels at minimum; 1920 × 1080 is fine and gives a little headroom. Anything under 1280 wide is upscaled and will look soft regardless of format.
Every thumbnail is generated at 1280 × 720 in sRGB, and the Pixado Score measures text readability and contrast at feed size, not at full resolution. A draft whose text would smear at 168 pixels is flagged before you export it.
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