How to Make a Google Play Feature Graphic: 1024×500 Specs and Safe Areas in Practice

Your phone screenshots are laid out, but when you hit publish Play Console is still stuck on "Graphics": you're missing a Feature Graphic. This image must be 1024×500, JPEG or 24-bit PNG (no alpha); one pixel off or a transparency channel and it gets rejected. It appears as the cover of the preview video on the details page, in some large-card featured placements and in some ad formats, and it follows different logic from your portrait screenshots.

Below are actionable steps based on Google's current official guidance. For phone screenshot counts, transparency and similar issues, see Google Play screenshot guidelines 2026 and fixing transparency rejections.

Memorize three hard requirements first

Size: 1024 wide × 500 high, a landscape banner. One pixel off in width or height and Console usually errors out; it won't rescale for you.

Format: JPEG or 24-bit PNG. If a PNG has alpha (a checkerboard transparent background), it's treated under Google's "no alpha" rule, the same as phone screenshots. Only the app icon may be a 512×512 32-bit transparent PNG; don't mix them up.

Purpose: when you have a preview video, it often serves as the video cover; without a video, it still appears in some large featured placements and ad slots. So "just blow up your logo" looks empty in lists and won't help you get picked for large cards.

Where to upload: Play Console → Grow → Store presence → Main store listing (or the custom listing you're editing) → the Feature graphic field under Graphics.

Layout: center first, edges as background

Google recommends placing the main visual and key copy toward the center, leaving the edges for areas that may be cropped. Different surfaces crop edges or overlay a play button or system UI; if your logo, app name or a UI thumbnail sits in the corners, it may be half cut off in featured placements.

In practice, leave yourself a "light on text" border on the canvas. A common approach is to use roughly the central 924×400 as the working area (about 50 pixels of buffer on each side), and fill the buffer only with brand color or gradient, no readable text. If you have a preview video, the play button also covers part of the center, so don't put the headline or logo dead center.

For color, pure white, pure black and dark gray tend to blend into the Play Store's background. A brand-color or slightly saturated gradient background is easier to recognize in thumbnails. Keep the Feature Graphic's main colors in the same family as your app icon and first screenshot, so the visuals feel continuous when users tap from search results into the details page.

What Google explicitly advises against putting in the image

These are spelled out clearly under "Highly recommended". They can disqualify your asset from featuring, and some also violate metadata policy:

• Wording implying rankings or sales, such as Best, #1, Top, a million downloads
• Prices, discounts, "free for a limited time" and other promotional language
• Calls to action like "Download now / Install now"
• Holiday copy that will go out of date (unless you plan to swap the image on time)
• Unauthorized third-party trademarks or characters
• Device imagery (Google notes it dates quickly and can alienate some users)
• Google Play or other store badges
• A blown-up brand mark nearly identical to the app icon (redundant when shown next to the icon)

In short: the Feature Graphic should say "what this app does and how it feels", not "how great we are, install now".

Don't pile on detail. On phones this image is shrunk a lot, and thin-line icons and three lines of small text turn into a gray band. One main visual and one short headline (about 8–14 Chinese characters, or a few words) are usually enough; a second-line subheadline is optional.

Export a version from a blank canvas on this site

Open the screenshot editor at /preview. First set the canvas to a 1024×500 banner. If the list has a close landscape preset, pick it and then verify the width and height with the size tool; if there's no exact preset, you can lock the pixels after export with image resize, but lay out your text on the correct canvas: if you lay out a portrait image and then stretch it into a banner, font sizes and safe areas will be off.

Fill the whole canvas with the background, with no transparent edges. Add a crop of a screenshot that represents your core interface, or a scene illustration, plus one short line of copy. The site limits how many images you can preview at once, but a Feature Graphic usually needs only 1, so export as soon as it's laid out.

Once you've exported the PNG, run two checks:

1. Use your system's "Get Info" or this site's image format converter to see whether there's still a transparency channel; if there is, convert to JPEG, or fill a solid background and save as 24-bit PNG.
2. Confirm the pixels are exactly 1024×500. If they're slightly off, use image resize to export at exact pixels rather than eyeballing the preview window.

The file size is usually far below the phone screenshot limit; if Console shows an additional per-image prompt, compress it a notch with image compression. Before uploading, we recommend filling in alt text (Google suggests about 140 characters or fewer) for screen-reader users and good accessibility practice.

If you need a "promo image with a phone frame" for your website or social posts, device frame preview is better suited. Keep that kind of image for off-store use; avoid putting whole-device imagery in the Feature Graphic itself, consistent with Google's "avoid device imagery". When device frames in store screenshots cross the line is covered separately in how to add real-device frames to store screenshots without breaking the rules.

How to check after uploading

Go back to the main store listing preview: check whether the cover is readable when there's a video, and whether the banner looks gray or empty when there isn't. Open the store details page on an ordinary Android phone (or a colleague's device) and confirm the headline survives the corner cropping. For localized listings, swap the Chinese headline on the Feature Graphic for the corresponding language; if the interface language changes but the banner is still in Chinese, the whole page looks out of step.

You don't need to resubmit the whole APK after changing the image, but store listing changes may go through review or take effect with a delay, depending on your account's current status. If the old image had a transparency layer or the wrong size, delete it in Console before uploading the new file, so the old asset isn't cached.

Keep maintaining your portrait phone images at 1080×1920-class specs; treat the Feature Graphic as a separate banner asset and put it on your release checklist alongside "icon / short description / at least two screenshots". To export several portrait images at once, use the Google Play screenshot generator or the multi-canvas flow in /preview.