Fortnite Thumbnail Size: The Complete Guide

Every island lives or dies by a thumbnail rendered small, in a row, next to a handful of other islands competing for the same glance. Get the spec wrong and your upload gets rejected outright. Get it technically right but composed poorly and it still won't do its job. Here's the exact size Epic requires, why square art no longer works, where the thumbnail actually shows up on Discover, what Epic's content rules forbid, and how to sanity-check your art before you spend a publish on it.

The short answer

If you only remember one thing from this page, remember the table below. Every other section explains why these numbers are what they are.

All five rows apply at once. A 1920×1080 PNG isn't enough — it has to be a JPG. A correctly-sized JPG isn't enough either, if it's over 5MB. Treat this as a checklist to run through on every export, not a single number to hit and move on from.

Square tiles are gone

For a long stretch, islands could ship a square thumbnail alongside — or instead of — a widescreen one, and that square art is what showed up in some tile layouts. That option is gone. Square 1024×1024 tiles were fully retired around June 16, 2025, and islands that only ever shipped square art lost their tile art entirely when that happened — there was no automatic conversion from the old square crop into the new 16:9 frame.

If you're working from an older asset library, or reusing art that predates that change, don't assume a square thumbnail from a previous upload still does anything. Every tile on Discover today is 16:9, full stop, and your source art needs to be composed for that frame from the start rather than cropped down from a square canvas after the fact.

Where your thumbnail actually appears

Discover organizes islands into rows of 6 tiles, each row carrying its own category label. Every tile in that row shows three things at once: your thumbnail, your island's title, and its current live player count, all stacked in a compact card. There's also an experimental "For You" row that uses larger tiles than the standard 6-across rows, giving your art more room to breathe when a player lands on it — but the 6-tile row is the layout your thumbnail needs to survive first, since it's the one that shows up everywhere.

That six-across layout is the whole reason size and composition matter as much as they do. A thumbnail that looks clear and detailed at full resolution on your monitor is one of six competing images squeezed into a single row, sitting next to a title and a player count that eat into the same small footprint. Composing for that reality, not for how the image looks zoomed in while you're editing it, is the actual job.

What Epic's content rules forbid

Beyond the size spec, Epic reviews thumbnails against a set of content rules before an island goes live. The core ones to know:

• Your thumbnail must accurately represent the island — no bait-and-switch art that shows something players won't actually find inside.
• No photographs of real people.
• No Epic logos, product names, or Battle Royale key art.
• No recreated Epic assets — don't rebuild official art and pass it off as your own thumbnail.

These rules exist independently of the size spec, and failing either one can get a thumbnail rejected. It's worth checking your art against both lists before you upload, since a technically perfect 1920×1080 JPG can still bounce on content grounds.

Safe zones: a heuristic, not a rule

Epic does not publish a pixel-level safe-zone spec for where UI sits on top of your thumbnail. Nothing below is an official rule — it's a heuristic worth following anyway, based on how the tile is laid out: keep your main subject clear of the lower strip where the title sits, and keep any text in your composition large enough to survive being shrunk down to tile size. Say it plainly: this is our advice, not Epic's.

Because there's no published spec to check against, the safest approach is to compose with generous margin around the edges and center your subject rather than pushing it to the corners, then judge the result at actual tile size rather than trusting how it looks at full resolution in your editor.

Check it before you publish

Before you spend a publish slot, drop your candidate art into a simulated Discover row and look at it the way a player actually will — small, six-across, next to other tiles, with a title and player count layered on top. That's the fastest way to catch a composition that only works zoomed in.

Previewing is a pre-publish step, not a substitute for real data. Once an island is live, Epic runs its own post-publish thumbnail test: two thumbnails, split 50/50, running for up to 90 days, judged on real click data from real players. That test settles close calls previewing never can, because it's measuring actual behavior instead of your best guess. The point of checking beforehand isn't to replace that test — it's to make sure the two thumbnails you feed into it are both worth testing in the first place, instead of burning part of that 90-day window on art that was never going to compete.

Related reading

• Fortnite Discover thumbnail tips for a 6-tile row
• Roblox thumbnail size guide