What is the aspect ratio of YouTube Shorts?

9:16 vertical is the standard, and square (1:1) is also accepted. YouTube's help pages say a Short must have a square or vertical aspect ratio and run up to 3 minutes. A horizontal video is uploaded as a regular video, not a Short.

What size is a YouTube Short?

1080 x 1920 pixels for a 9:16 Short, or 1080 x 1080 for a square one. Those are the sizes to export at. Higher resolutions are accepted, but on a phone the difference is small.

What resolution should a YouTube Short be?

1080 x 1920 (1080p vertical) is the practical standard. 720 x 1280 uploads and plays, but looks softer. If you shoot in 4K vertical you can upload it, and YouTube will offer the higher quality where the viewer's screen and connection allow.

Do I need #Shorts in the title?

No. YouTube decides that an upload is a Short from its shape and length: square or vertical, up to 3 minutes. A hashtag does not turn a horizontal video into a Short.

What is the YouTube Shorts safe zone?

YouTube does not publish exact pixel margins. As a rule of thumb, keep text and faces out of the bottom strip where the title, channel name and subscribe button appear (roughly the lowest 15%, more when a title runs to two lines), away from the column of buttons on the right edge, and a little below the top.

Can I upload a horizontal video as a Short?

Not as a Short: a 16:9 video is treated as a regular upload. Convert it to 9:16 first with a crop, a blurred background or an AI reframe that follows the speaker, then upload it.

Why is my Short over one minute blocked?

YouTube blocks a Short longer than one minute worldwide while it has an active Content ID claim of any type, for example from music added outside YouTube. It becomes viewable again once the claim is resolved. Shorts under one minute are not affected by this rule.

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YouTube Shorts aspect ratio, size and resolution

By the OpenShorts team· Published 2026-10-29· Updated 2026-10-29

A YouTube Short is 9:16 vertical at 1080 x 1920 pixels. YouTube also accepts square (1:1, 1080 x 1080). It must run up to 3 minutes. Square or vertical and up to 3 minutes is what makes an upload a Short; no hashtag is needed.

A horizontal 16:9 video is uploaded as a regular video, however short it is. To make it a Short, convert it to 9:16 with a crop, a blurred background or an AI reframe that keeps the speaker in shot.

Keep text out of the bottom strip, where the Shorts player shows the title, channel name and subscribe button, and away from the buttons down the right edge (as of October 2026).

Aspect ratio9:16Square 1:1 also accepted

Size1080 x 1920Pixels, width by height

Max length3 minUploads from 15 Oct 2024

HorizontalNot a ShortUploaded as a regular video

Next step Turn a long video into Shorts with AI

Paste a YouTube link and get 1080 x 1920 Shorts with captions and a hook. Cloud free plan with a watermark, paid plans from $12/month, self-hosted $0 under MIT.

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YouTube Shorts specs at a glance

Spec	Use this	Notes
Aspect ratio	9:16 vertical	Square (1:1) is accepted too; horizontal is not a Short
Size	1080 x 1920 px	1080 x 1080 for a square Short
Resolution	1080p vertical	720p uploads but looks softer; 4K vertical is accepted
Length	Up to 3 minutes	For uploads from 15 October 2024; 60 seconds before
File	MP4, H.264, AAC	The safest upload; YouTube accepts most common formats
Frame rate	Same as the source	24, 25, 30, 50 and 60 fps all work
Text safe area	Centre of the frame	The bottom strip and the right edge are covered by the player

Length and aspect ratio from YouTube's help pages; the player layout as of October 2026. YouTube tests interface changes gradually, so your app may differ slightly.

9:16, square, and why horizontal is not a Short

YouTube's help pages describe a Short by two properties: a square or vertical aspect ratio and a length of up to 3 minutes. An upload that has both is a Short and appears on the Shorts shelf and in the Shorts feed. One that is horizontal is a regular video, even at 30 seconds, and one that is vertical but longer than 3 minutes is a regular video too.

9:16 is the shape to aim for because the Shorts player is full screen on a phone held upright. A square Short is allowed, but in the player it sits in the middle with space above and below, so it fills only part of the screen. Square makes sense when the same file must also work in a square placement elsewhere; for Shorts alone, vertical uses the whole screen.

Uploading the same video as a Short and as a regular video is a matter of the file, not a setting: export a 9:16 version for Shorts and keep the 16:9 one for the main channel.

YouTube Shorts size and resolution

1080 x 1920 is the size to export a vertical Short at, and 1080 x 1080 a square one. It is the width that fills a phone screen sharply without being enlarged. A 720 x 1280 file has the same shape and uploads fine, but after YouTube's compression it looks noticeably softer on faces and text. If you shoot vertical 4K (2160 x 3840), YouTube accepts it and can serve a higher-quality stream where the screen and connection allow; whether viewers see the difference on a phone is another matter, and the file takes much longer to upload.

Export settings that work: MP4 with H.264 video in 8-bit 4:2:0 colour (yuv420p), the source frame rate, and AAC audio at 48 kHz. In ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i edit.mov -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 192k -ar 48000 -movflags +faststart short.mp4

How long can a YouTube Short be?

Up to 3 minutes. YouTube raised the limit from 60 seconds for videos uploaded from 15 October 2024; a vertical video longer than a minute uploaded before that date stays a regular video. The help page on three-minute Shorts adds one rule worth knowing: a Short longer than one minute with an active Content ID claim of any type is blocked worldwide until the claim is resolved. If you add a commercial song outside YouTube, keep the Short under a minute or use music you are sure is cleared.

As with any short-form format, the limit is a ceiling. A Short is decided in the first second or two of the feed, and most moments that hold a stranger run well under a minute.

YouTube Shorts safe zones

The Shorts player draws its controls on top of the video. As of October 2026:

The bottom strip carries the title, the channel name and avatar, the subscribe button and, when present, the sound and a related-video link. It grows when the title runs to two lines.
The right edge carries a column of buttons: like, dislike, comments, share, remix and the sound thumbnail.
The top carries the search and menu icons.

YouTube does not publish exact pixel margins, so treat numbers as rules of thumb. A practical working area on a 1080 x 1920 frame: keep captions and key text above the lowest 15% or so of the frame, clear of the right-hand 10 to 15%, and a little below the top edge. Faces and the main action belong in the centre of the frame. Check a draft on your own phone before you publish a batch.

OpenShorts places burned-in captions about 15% of the frame height above the bottom edge, so the title, channel name and buttons of the Shorts player do not sit on top of them.

How to turn a 16:9 video into a 9:16 Short

A horizontal video has to change shape before it can be a Short. There are three common ways, and one smart one.

Crop to fill. Cut a 9:16 window out of the middle and enlarge it. It looks native, but keeps only about a third of the width, so a subject who moves, or a second person, ends up out of frame.
Blurred background. Keep the whole 16:9 picture across the middle and fill above and below with a blurred copy. Nothing is lost, but the picture is small: about 608 pixels tall in a 1920-pixel frame.
Black bars. The same, with black instead of blur. The simplest and the least attractive.
Reframe that follows the speaker. A crop that moves with the face that is talking, two speakers stacked one above the other, or a screen recording kept readable with the presenter beside it.

The first three run in your browser, with no upload and no account, in the free 16:9 to 9:16 converter. A centred crop in ffmpeg is one line:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=ih*9/16:ih,scale=1080:1920" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac short.mp4

The fourth is what an AI reframe does, and why a fixed crop is fine for a single speaker sitting still but not for a podcast, an interview or a talk. The modes are explained on the auto reframe page.

Common mistakes

Uploading a short horizontal clip and expecting a Short. Shape decides it, not length alone.
Captions in the TV position. Low captions end up under the title and channel name.
Text under the right-hand buttons. Long captions that run edge to edge get partly covered.
Exporting at 720p to save time. The softness shows after compression.
A claimed song on a two-minute Short. Over one minute, an active Content ID claim blocks the Short.

Next step: make Shorts from your long videos

Getting the aspect ratio right is the easy part. The work behind a steady flow of Shorts is finding the moments in your long videos that stand alone and cutting each one: reframed to 9:16, captioned, with a hook in the first seconds. OpenShorts reads the whole video, picks those moments and returns them as 1080 x 1920 Shorts, 15 to 60 seconds by default and up to 3 minutes if you raise the maximum. It can publish them to your channel or schedule a week of them. See the YouTube Shorts maker for the details.

OpenShorts Cloud has a free plan: your first video is clipped whole up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month, with a watermark and no credit card. Paid plans start at $12/month with no watermark, and the self-hosted edition is $0 under the MIT licence (all plans).

Next step Paste a YouTube link, get 9:16 Shorts

Moments picked from the whole video, reframed to follow the speaker, captioned word by word.