Safe Zone Checkers — Free Overlay Tools for Every Platform

Most short-form video and full-bleed image formats play edge to edge, but the app doesn’t hand you the whole frame. It reserves regions for its own controls: a status bar and label across the top, a vertical action rail (like, comment, share, save, audio) down one side, and a dense bottom block with the username, caption, audio credit, and the device’s navigation. Those regions don’t move out of the way for your content — they sit on top of it.

The safe zone is everything left over: the area where you can place meaningful content and trust it’ll be seen. On a 9:16 clip that’s roughly the centre of the frame, biased slightly upward, well clear of the right rail and the bottom third. Your footage isn’t cropped — anything under the interface is still in the file — but it’s covered, which for a hook or a call-to-action is just as bad.

Each tool draws the chosen platform’s interface zones as labelled rectangles over a frame you supply, then reports one honest number per zone: the percentage of the total frame that zone covers. That figure is pure geometry — the tool is not looking at your image and makes no claim about whether your subject is blocked, because no browser tool can know what the subject of your clip is without guessing. We’d rather give you an accurate map of the interface and let you judge the overlap with your own eyes than fabricate a confident “subject covered” score.

Use the legend toggles to isolate one zone while you fine-tune placement, and read the per-zone notes for what each region contains. The positions are transcribed from documented UI measurements, not guesswork — but they remain a guide rather than a pixel-exact spec, because platforms nudge their layouts between app versions, devices, and screen sizes.

These checkers use the browser’s Canvas API. Your frame goes from your device into the page’s memory, gets drawn with the overlays there, and any annotated preview you download goes straight back to your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged — there’s no account, no queue, and no server round-trip. The tools work the same offline as on Wi-Fi, and closing the tab leaves nothing behind.

The only data the page reads from us is the canvas size for the format you picked, which comes from the same verified, dated dataset as our size guides. That keeps the frame you check against in lockstep with the spec sheet it links to, so the two can’t quietly fall out of agreement.

Whichever platform you’re posting to, the reliable real estate is the centre of the frame. Keep faces, products, and any text you need read inside that band, clear of the action rail and the bottom block. If your hook is text, it works best in the upper-middle — high enough to clear the caption block, low enough to clear the top bar. Decorative backgrounds can run edge to edge happily; it’s the meaningful elements that need to stay in the open.

Treat the side and bottom margins as borrowed space: fine for atmosphere, risky for anything a viewer has to actually see. And because the overlays are a strong guide rather than a hard crop, leave yourself a little margin rather than placing content right at a zone edge.