Dominant colors, hex codes, and which ones survive being shrunk.
Drop an image to pull its dominant colors, click any pixel to sample it exactly, and copy the hex codes. Every color is also checked for whether text in it stays readable at feed size, which is the part most palette tools skip.
Drop or click to upload
Drag & drop or paste from clipboard
JPG, PNG, WebP — 25MB max
Click anywhere on the image to sample that exact pixel.
Pulling hex codes out of an image is the easy half. The half that decides whether a thumbnail works is which of those colors you can actually put text on, because a thumbnail is almost never viewed at full size. On a phone feed it is roughly the width of a thumb.
That is why this tool reports a contrast ratio next to every swatch instead of just handing you a grid of pretty squares. The ratio is the standard WCAG measure: it compares the relative luminance of two colors and returns a number from 1 (identical) to 21 (pure black on pure white).
| Ratio | Verdict | What it means for a thumbnail |
|---|---|---|
| 7.0 and above | Strong | Readable at any size, including a small phone feed tile. This is where thumbnail text should live. |
| 4.5 to 7.0 | Passes | Fine for body text at normal sizes. For thumbnail text it is workable, but add a stroke or shadow if the text is thin. |
| 3.0 to 4.5 | Large text only | Only safe for big, heavy type. It will start to disappear as the image shrinks. |
| Below 3.0 | Fails | Do not put text here without an outline or a solid backing shape behind it. |
Recognisability in a feed comes from repetition, and color is the fastest signal a viewer processes, well before they read the title. A practical approach:
The palette comes from median-cut quantisation: the tool takes every sampled pixel, repeatedly splits the color space along whichever axis has the widest spread, and averages what lands in each bucket. It produces the colors that best represent the whole image, which is not the same as the most eye-catching one.
A small, brilliant highlight can be visually dominant while occupying a fraction of a percent of the pixels, so it will not appear in a six-color palette. When you want that specific color, click it directly on the image; the eyedropper reads the exact pixel rather than an average. The percentage next to each swatch tells you how much of the image that color actually covers.
Once you have your colors, the thumbnail contrast checker tests a finished thumbnail as a whole, and the editor lets you apply the hex codes to text and shapes directly.
Keep going without re-uploading — your image carries over to the next tool automatically.