Free TikTok safe zone checker

What the safe zone is

On a vertical video app your video is never shown alone. The top carries the tabs and the search icon, the right side carries the like, comment and share buttons, and the bottom carries your username, the caption, the sound and sometimes a call-to-action button. Anything important placed there (a caption, a face, a price, a logo) is partly hidden.

The safe zone is what is left: the area where text and key visuals stay readable whatever the app draws on top. Designing inside it is the single easiest way to make a vertical video look professional.

Where these zones come from

Each platform publishes safe-zone guidance for vertical ads, and the organic interface is very close to it. On a 1080×1920 frame this tool uses: TikTok, 240 px at the top, 660 px at the bottom, 120 px on each side, plus the button column on the right from 840 px down (scaled from TikTok’s in-feed template); Instagram Reels, 14% at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% on each side, following Meta’s Reels guidance; YouTube Shorts, 288 px at the top, 672 px at the bottom, 48 px on the left and 192 px on the right, following Google’s vertical video ad margins.

These are deliberately conservative. The real interface varies with the phone, the app version, the length of your caption and whether the post is an ad, so treat the shaded areas as “keep critical content out”, not as exact pixels.

How to use the checker

Click the frame or drop a file: a PNG or JPG screenshot of your design, or a video (MP4, MOV, WebM). For a video, use the slider to move through it and check several moments, especially those with on-screen text. Toggle TikTok, Reels and Shorts to see each zone, or keep all three on to see the area that is safe everywhere. Download the frame with the overlay to share it with an editor or a client.

Files never leave your device: the image is drawn on a canvas in the page, and no upload happens.

Tips for vertical layouts

Put captions in the middle third of the frame, slightly above center. Keep faces in the upper middle, away from the bottom caption area. Leave the right edge for the buttons: a title that runs to the edge will collide with them. And if you post the same video on all three platforms, design for the combined safe area. Motiongist videos are laid out inside it by default.