Roblox Thumbnail Size (2026)

A Roblox experience thumbnail should be uploaded at 1920×1080 pixels in a 16:9 aspect ratio — the same widescreen shape as a landscape video. The game icon is a completely different asset: a square 1:1 image of at least 512×512 pixels. These two images do different jobs in different places, which is why Roblox keeps them separate, and why sizing one correctly does nothing for the other.

Getting both right matters more than it looks. On the Roblox Home page, in search, and across the Discover feed, your icon and thumbnails are the entire first impression — a player decides whether to click long before they read a single word of your description. Blurry, stretched, or badly cropped art reads as a low-effort experience, and the platform’s recommendation surfaces reward click-through. Clean, correctly sized art is one of the cheapest conversion wins you have, and unlike your game’s code it takes an afternoon rather than a month to fix.

Experience thumbnail: 1920×1080, 16:9

Thumbnails are the large, landscape images that appear in the carousel at the top of your experience’s detail page and across promotional surfaces on the Home page. Upload them at 1920×1080. That resolution is comfortably sharp on desktop monitors and 4K TVs running the Roblox app, and it scales down cleanly to the smaller slots used in feeds and on mobile. Because it’s the same 16:9 geometry the rest of the web uses for video, you can reuse editing templates and export presets you already own.

You can upload multiple thumbnails per experience and reorder them; the first one is what most players see first, so lead with your strongest frame. Roblox accepts several formats here — JPG, PNG, GIF, TGA and BMP are all supported — but for a flat marketing image, JPG (for photographic, gradient-heavy scenes) or PNG (for crisp text and hard edges) are the practical choices. Note that uploaded images pass through a moderation queue before they go live, so plan for a short review delay rather than an instant swap, especially right before a big update.

What goes in a good thumbnail

• One clear focal point. A character, a vehicle, a landmark from your map — something that telegraphs the experience at a glance.
• Readable text, if any. Short labels only (“Update 5!”, “New Map”). Long sentences vanish at thumbnail scale.
• High contrast. Your thumbnail sits next to dozens of competitors in the carousel; muddy, low-contrast art disappears.
• Safe framing. Keep important subjects away from the extreme edges, since different surfaces crop the frame slightly differently.

Game icon: 512×512, 1:1 square

The icon is the small square badge that represents your experience in search results, on the Home rows, and in a player’s recently-played list. Upload it as a square at 512×512 pixels or larger, keeping the aspect ratio exactly 1:1 so Roblox never has to stretch it. A larger square source (for example 1024×1024) is fine and gives the platform more detail to downscale from, which is worth doing because downscaling always looks better than upscaling.

The critical design constraint is scale. Your icon may be displayed at roughly 150×150 pixels in parts of the site and app — sometimes smaller on a crowded mobile screen. Anything intricate turns to mush at that size. Treat the icon like a logo: one bold subject, generous margins, strong silhouette, and no small text. A face, a single prop, or a simple emblem works far better than a busy screenshot. If you are unsure, shrink your icon to 150 pixels on your own screen and check that it still reads from arm’s length — that squint test catches most problems instantly.

Where each image appears

Because the two live in different slots, they should be designed to work together but not be identical. A common mistake is to shrink the landscape thumbnail into the square icon slot: you either crop off half the composition or letterbox it with dead space. Design the icon as its own tightly-framed square from the start, then echo its colors and subject in the thumbnail so the two feel like one brand without being the same image.

How to set them in the Creator Hub

1. Open the Creator Hub and go to your Creations, then select the experience.
2. Choose Configure, then the Thumbnails (sometimes grouped with Icon) section.
3. Upload your 512×512+ icon in the icon slot and your 1920×1080 image(s) in the thumbnail slot.
4. Reorder thumbnails so your best frame is first, then save.
5. Wait for moderation approval before the new art appears publicly.

Menu wording shifts as Roblox updates the Creator Hub, so if a label has moved, look for the words “icon” and “thumbnail” rather than a fixed path. When in doubt, follow the current steps in Roblox’s own Creator Documentation rather than an outdated screenshot from a tutorial.

File format, compression and quality

Roblox recompresses every image you upload to standardize file sizes across its CDN. That means the version players see is never byte-for-byte what you uploaded — it is a re-encoded copy. You cannot switch that off, but you can feed it a clean source so the compressed result still looks good:

• Start at full resolution. Never upscale a small image to hit 1920×1080; you only amplify the blur. Export from your design tool at native size.
• Avoid pre-compressing to oblivion. A heavily-saved, artifact-ridden JPG gets recompressed on top of its own artifacts. Export at high quality and let Roblox do the shrinking.
• Prefer PNG for text and sharp edges, JPG for photographic scenes. If your icon has crisp lettering or a hard-edged logo, PNG survives recompression better.
• Keep Home-page personalization uploads under about 3 MB where that limit applies; a 1920×1080 image sits comfortably under it.

If you need to resize or re-crop a source without re-exporting from a heavy editor, a browser tool like our image resizer handles the pixel math quickly, and our aspect ratio calculator confirms your crop lands exactly on 16:9 or 1:1 before you upload.

Refreshing art around updates and seasons

Thumbnails are not set-and-forget. The most successful Roblox experiences treat art as a living marketing surface: they swap the lead thumbnail when a major update ships, add a small “NEW” style flash for a limited window, and rotate seasonal variants (a winter map, an event skin) to signal freshness. Because you can hold several thumbnails and reorder them, you can run a lightweight A/B test — make the lead thumbnail your experiment, watch how click-through and visit numbers move in your analytics after it goes live, and keep the winner. Change one thing at a time (the lead image, the headline text, the color) so you can tell what actually moved the needle.

A worked example: art for a new tycoon game

Say you are launching a tycoon experience. Your icon needs to say tycoon at 150 pixels, so you pick one bold symbol — a stack of cash, or a single factory building — centered on a high-contrast background, rendered at 1024×1024 and exported as a PNG so the edges stay crisp after recompression. Your lead thumbnail, at 1920×1080, tells a richer story: a wide shot of the factory floor with a character in the foreground and two or three words of overlay text like Build Your Empire placed well inside the safe margins. A second thumbnail shows the latest update map; a third shows a popular in-game item. The icon and the lead thumbnail share a color palette and the same character, so a player who spots the icon in search recognizes the experience instantly when they land on the detail page. That visual through-line is what separates a polished listing from a pile of mismatched screenshots, and it costs nothing beyond a few minutes of planning before you export.

Color, contrast and readability

Roblox feeds are crowded, bright and dominated by saturated art, so muted or low-contrast images sink to the bottom of the visual stack. Push contrast and saturation a little further than feels natural on your editing monitor, because recompression and small display sizes both flatten an image. Favor a clear figure-ground relationship — a bright subject on a darker background, or the reverse — which reads far better in a tiny tile than a busy scene where everything competes for attention. If you add text, give it a heavy weight, a contrasting outline or drop shadow, and plenty of size; thin or low-contrast lettering is always the first thing to vanish. The same principles carry over whether you are designing for the desktop carousel, a mobile Home row, or a TV running the Roblox app, because the art has to survive the smallest surface to work on the largest.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

The thumbnail looks soft after upload. Usually the source was below 1920×1080 and got upscaled, or it was already a low-quality JPG. Re-export a sharp original at full resolution. The same discipline that keeps a YouTube thumbnail crisp applies here: resolution in equals resolution out.

The icon looks cramped or cut off. You likely reused the landscape art. Rebuild the icon as a native square with the subject centered and padded.

Text is unreadable. It is almost always too small or too long. Cut the copy to two or three words and enlarge it dramatically.

Colors look dull next to competitors. Boost contrast and saturation before export; the carousel is a visual shouting match.

If you publish art across several platforms, it helps to keep a short internal spec sheet of each one’s requirements the way you would track a video aspect ratio — the numbers are small, but mixing them up is the single most common reason creator art looks off.

Quick reference

• Experience thumbnail: 1920×1080, 16:9, JPG or PNG.
• Game icon: 512×512 or larger, 1:1 square, designed to read at ~150px.
• Expect recompression; upload clean, full-resolution sources.
• Set both in Creator Hub > Configure > Thumbnails/Icon, and wait for moderation.