YouTube Shorts size: 1080 by 1920

The frame is 16:9 turned on its side, which is why the pixel count is identical to a 1080p widescreen frame at 2.07 megapixels. That coincidence is useful when budgeting encoding time and useless when planning a shot, because a composition that works across a wide frame has almost nothing in common with one that works down a tall one.

The interface takes a real bite out of it. A title and channel row sits low on the left, a column of action controls runs up the right hand side, and the description and audio attribution occupy the bottom. None of that is your picture, so a composition that centres its subject horizontally will have it partly behind the right hand column on a narrow phone.

This is the same pixel frame as an Instagram Story and a TikTok video, which means a single master export can feed all three. What does not transfer is the safe area: each platform puts its controls in different places, so a caption positioned to clear one platform's interface can sit directly under another's.

For a still at this size, the cropper offers a 9:16 ratio and the social post generator composes at 1080 by 1920 directly. Both give you the frame at the right shape and resolution. Neither knows where this platform draws its controls, so the safe area inside the frame is still a judgement you make and then confirm on a real handset.