YouTube Shorts Dimensions: 1080 × 1920, and What Other Shapes Lose

YouTube Shorts size at a glance

A 720 × 1280 export is also 9:16. It simply has fewer pixels than the 1080p ceiling allows.

Fitting other shapes into a 9:16 frame (calculated)

If your footage is not 9:16, you can do one of two things. You can pad it, which keeps the whole picture and adds bars. Or you can crop it, which fills the screen but cuts the sides. Either way, the result is the same fraction of the frame:

• Pad: share of the 1080 × 1920 frame the picture covers = (9/16) ÷ (source width / source height), for any source wider than 9:16.
• Crop: share of the source width you keep after a center crop = that same number.

So a square video uses 56.25% of a Shorts screen if you pad it. If you crop it instead, you lose 43.75% of its width.

Half-pixel heights such as 607.5 are exact results. An editor rounds them to whole pixels.

What a landscape clip becomes after cropping

Cropping a 16:9 recording to 9:16 keeps a strip 9/16 × 9/16, or 31.64%, of the original width. How sharp the Short looks depends on what you started with:

A 1080p landscape clip cropped to vertical has to be enlarged by about 1.78 times. Even a 4K landscape original leaves only a little spare resolution once it is cropped. If you know a scene will become a Short, it is better to frame it vertically when you shoot.

from fractions import Fraction as F
target = F(9, 16)
def share(w, h):
    return min(target, F(w, h)) / max(target, F(w, h))
assert share(16, 9) == F(81, 256) and round(float(share(16, 9)) * 100, 2) == 31.64
assert share(1, 1) == F(9, 16) and share(4, 5) == F(45, 64) and share(3, 4) == F(3, 4)
assert F(1920 * 16, 9) == F(10240, 3)  # 3413.33 px, so you need 3414 px of width
for w, h, scale in [(1920, 1080, '1.78'), (2560, 1440, '1.33'), (3840, 2160, '0.89')]:
    strip = F(h * 9, 16)
    assert f"{float(F(1080) / strip):.2f}" == scale
print('Shorts frame checks passed')

How the top search results disagree (observed)

On October 9, 2026 (UTC), we searched Google for "youtube shorts dimensions" in English, set to the United States, with personalization off (pws=0), and read the top ten organic results. Seven had page text we could read. The other three were a forum thread, a help-community video page, and one page that rate-limited us. We compared what the readable pages claim with YouTube Help as of that date:

That last row deserves care. A "safe area" here means space kept clear of the Shorts player's buttons and captions. The figure appears in third-party guides, but we did not find it in YouTube Help, and other guides describe the overlays differently. If you need one, check your own Short on a phone instead of trusting a number from a guide.

Those six rows describe the pages as they read on that date. Search results and pages both change, so treat this as a dated snapshot, not a ranking of sites.

Shorts thumbnail size and custom covers

The rules for a Shorts thumbnail image differ from the rules for the video. YouTube Help lists the general thumbnail rules on its thumbnail page. Our YouTube thumbnail size guide quotes them, including the 50 MB desktop limit for video, Shorts, and podcast thumbnails.

To prepare a vertical cover, use the 2160 × 3840 Shorts preset in the thumbnail resizer.

If the image you saved does not show on your channel, see our saved-cover test from October 6, 2026. In that test, Studio showed the new image. Two later channel cards still showed the old one. That was one test, so it does not establish a general delay.

To save the image a Short already uses, paste its link into the thumbnail downloader. It accepts Shorts links, and the image it returns may not be portrait-shaped.

Before you upload

1. Export at 1080 × 1920, 9:16. YouTube will not accept more than 1080p for a Short.
2. Keep the video to three minutes or less, and keep it square or vertical.
3. If your source is not 9:16, choose between padding and cropping using the table above. Both leave the picture covering the same share of the frame or source width.
4. Watch the finished Short on a phone before deciding where to put text.