YouTube Shorts subtitle placement

What can overlap a subtitle

In our own Shorts captures (described below, and still pending), the UI that actually sat on top of the video was a column of action buttons (like, comment, share) down the right side, the channel/author row near the bottom-left, and a small thumbnail in the bottom-right corner. The description line and the app's status and navigation bars rendered outside the video frame, not over it. A subtitle placed low and wide — a common default — is therefore most exposed near the bottom-left author row and the right-side buttons.

What the tool loads for Shorts

In Reference · Organic mode, the active Shorts reference is an independent secondary measurement — not a first-party phone capture — sourced from a published 375×667 mobile-player measurement, scaled up to a 1080×1920 reference frame. It's expressed as four edge-exclusion bands (top, bottom, left, right), not as individually labeled UI elements like "like button" or "caption text" — the source document didn't break it down further, so this tool doesn't invent that breakdown either. A Shorts conflict therefore means the Subtitle entered one of those margins — not that it was confirmed to sit under a specific button.

Confidence on this reference is recorded as medium, and it's the one platform where the tool doesn't yet use a first-party device capture in production. That's covered next.

A first-party measurement exists — but it's pending

We captured Shorts on a physical Galaxy S20 Ultra (YouTube app 21.37.42, Korean UI) and measured a real action rail, author row, and thumbnail position from clean screenshots. It's kept in the project as evidence, but it does not feed collision checks or Find safer position yet — it's marked pending, one step below the current status the active reference above has.

Why: the clean samples came from the normal swipe feed and show a consistent 9:16 display area, but we haven't yet captured one controlled sample in that same feed state confirming that the source video maps onto that area with no crop on any edge. An earlier Shorts measurement attempt was discarded after its video boundary turned out to be wrong, so this project requires that confirmation before promoting the Shorts capture. Until it exists, the older, broader reference stays active.

This is the kind of honesty this tool is built around: evidence status (current / pending / legacy) is tracked independently of how the measurement was taken, and only current evidence ever drives a Safe/Warning/Overlap result or Auto Position.

Using it

Switch Data to Reference · Organic, place your Subtitle, and check the Shorts column. If it's not Safe, either drag the Subtitle up and away from the bottom/right bands manually, or use Find safer position to search all three platforms at once — Shorts included.

Limitations

• The active reference is a scaled secondary measurement, not a device capture — treat it as a reasonable approximation, not an exact boundary.
• A newer first-party capture exists but isn't promoted yet (see above).
• Real Shorts UI shifts with app version, account state, video length, and whether captions/end screens are on — none of that is modeled here.