See what the app covers before you post
Nothing is uploaded — your file is read straight off your disk. The TikTok and YouTube Shorts overlays were measured on 13 September 2026, by loading each app's player with the browser window forced to exactly 9:16 and reading the position of every control. Published guides disagree by up to 234 pixels on the same edge. The area that stays clear on all three apps at once is 841 × 1360 — 55% of the frame.
Red is what the interface covers. The dashed box is what is left. Both are drawn to scale on a 1080 × 1920 frame.
A Reel, a Short and a TikTok are all 1080 × 1920, and all three apps draw their own interface directly on top of that. A caption block along the bottom, a column of buttons down the right, a bar at the top. Whatever you put underneath is still in the file, still in your export, and invisible to everyone watching.
The awkward part is that nobody agrees on how much. Three guides published this year put TikTok’s bottom margin at 250, 400 and 484 pixels — a spread of 234 pixels, more than a tenth of the frame. Pick the smallest and your caption is buried; pick the largest and you have thrown away a band of picture for nothing.
So the TikTok and YouTube Shorts overlays on this page were measured rather than repeated. On 13 September 2026 each app’s player was loaded with the browser window forced to exactly 9:16, so the video filled the frame edge to edge, and the position of every control was read off directly and scaled onto a 1080 × 1920 canvas. TikTok’s caption block began 422 pixels up from the bottom. Shorts’ channel row began at 299, its top bar ended at 138, and its action rail took the rightmost 138 pixels. Instagram could not be measured the same way, and the page says so on every Reels zone rather than quietly averaging someone else’s numbers.
Put the three together and the area that survives on all of them is 841 × 1360 — 55% of the frame. That is the box to design in if you post the same file everywhere. Drop a clip above to see it over your own footage, or take the transparent 1080 × 1920 PNG into your editor. If your source is not vertical yet, the Image Resizer will get a still to size, the YouTube Thumbnail Tester does the same job for a 16:9 thumbnail, and the Video to GIF converter turns a finished clip into a loop.
The full method, the per-platform numbers and why Instagram could not be measured the same way are written up in the measurement write-up.
The part of your 1080×1920 frame that the app does not cover with its own interface. TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts all draw a caption block, a column of buttons down the right and a bar at the top and the bottom directly on top of your video. Anything you place under those is still in the file and still invisible. The safe zone is what is left.
Because most of them are copied rather than measured, and because the real value moves. Three guides published this year quote TikTok's bottom margin as 250, 400 and 484 pixels — a spread of 234 pixels, more than a tenth of the whole frame height. Measured on TikTok's own mobile player on 13 September 2026, the caption block began 422 pixels up from the bottom on a two-line caption. A longer caption pushes it higher, which is the answer nobody can put in a single number: it depends on your caption.
Every zone carries its own tag. The YouTube Shorts zones and TikTok's action rail, caption block and bottom bar were measured on 13 September 2026 by loading each platform's mobile player with the browser viewport forced to exactly 9:16, so the video filled the frame and every control's position mapped straight onto a 1080×1920 canvas. TikTok's top bar and all four Instagram Reels zones are published guidance instead. TikTok's logged-out web player shows an Open app banner the real app does not have, so measuring its top bar would describe the website rather than the app. Instagram's logged-out player renders the video at 375×622, which is not 9:16 at all, underneath an interstitial — there is no honest way to map that onto a frame.
841×1360 pixels, which is 55 per cent of a 1080×1920 frame. That is the intersection: 138 pixels clear at the top, 422 at the bottom, 60 on the left and 179 on the right. If you want one master file that works on TikTok, Reels and Shorts without repositioning anything, you are composing for a little over half the canvas and the rest belongs to the app.
1080×1920, 9:16, which all three platforms take. If your source is a different shape this page tells you how much is lost when it is filled into 9:16 — a 16:9 clip loses about 68 per cent of its width, which is usually a bigger problem than the safe zone.
No. The file is read by your browser from your own disk and played inside this page. There is no upload request — open your browser's network tab and you will see the page make none. That also means a video of any length or size works, because nothing has to travel anywhere.
Yes. The download button gives you a transparent 1080×1920 PNG of whichever platform is selected, with the covered areas shaded and the safe box outlined. Put it on a top layer in Premiere, Resolve, CapCut or Canva, line your titles up under it, then hide the layer before you export.