Social Media Image Sizes: A Practical Guide for Posts, Stories and Covers

Every social platform shows images in its own shapes, and when your picture doesn’t match, the platform crops it for you, often cutting off heads, products or text. Getting the shape right matters more than getting the exact pixel count right. This guide covers the shapes and sizes that work on the major platforms, and a simple workflow to prepare your images.

A quick caution before the numbers: platforms redesign their apps regularly, and recommended sizes shift with them. The figures below are widely used, well-supported choices, but check each platform’s own help pages for the latest guidance before a big campaign.

Shape first: aspect ratios in plain English

An aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height. 1:1 is a square. 4:5 is a slightly tall rectangle. 16:9 is widescreen, like a TV. 9:16 is the same turned on its side, filling a phone screen top to bottom. If your image has the right ratio, the platform can scale it up or down without cropping anything. Most phone photos are 4:3 (or 3:4 held upright), which matches none of the common social shapes exactly, so a little cropping is almost always needed.

Instagram

• Square post: 1:1, 1080 × 1080 pixels. The classic, safe choice.
• Portrait post: 4:5, 1080 × 1350 pixels. Takes up more of the screen in the feed, which tends to help engagement.
• Stories and Reels: 9:16, 1080 × 1920 pixels. Keep important text and faces away from the top and bottom edges, where the app places its own buttons and captions.

Instagram has experimented with taller previews on profile grids, so some creators now favor portrait shapes; whatever you choose, keep the subject near the center so it survives any cropping in previews.

YouTube

• Video thumbnail: 16:9, 1280 × 720 pixels is the long-standing recommendation, with a small file size limit (historically 2 MB). Bold, readable text and a clear face work well because thumbnails are shown small.
• Channel banner: a very wide image that is cropped differently on TVs, desktops and phones. Keep logos and text within the central safe area YouTube shows when you upload.

Facebook

• Feed images: square (1:1) or portrait (4:5) images display well on phones; landscape images work too but appear smaller.
• Page cover photo: displayed at about 820 × 312 pixels on computers and cropped to a narrower shape on phones. A commonly used upload size is 851 × 315; keep key content in the middle.
• Link previews: roughly 1.91:1, such as 1200 × 630 pixels. This is set by the website being shared.

X (Twitter) and LinkedIn

• X header: 3:1, 1500 × 500 pixels. Your profile picture overlaps the lower left on many layouts, so don’t put important details there.
• X in-feed images: 16:9 is a safe choice for single images that show uncropped.
• LinkedIn profile banner: 4:1, 1584 × 396 pixels. The profile photo covers part of the left side, especially on phones.
• LinkedIn posts: square and 4:5 portrait images take up more of the feed than landscape ones.

A simple workflow: crop, resize, compress

1. Crop to the right shape. In Crop Image, choose a ratio (1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 9:16) or a social preset, then drag the box to frame your subject. Presets like “Instagram portrait” or “YouTube thumbnail” crop and resize to the recommended pixels in one step. With a whole batch, Auto-frame moves every box onto the faces or main subject for you.
2. Resize if needed. If you cropped with a plain ratio, set the final width with Resize Image, for example 1080 pixels for Instagram.
3. Add a watermark, optionally. Creators and photographers often add a subtle name or logo with Add Watermark before posting.
4. Compress last. Platforms re-compress everything you upload. Giving them a clean, reasonably sized file (a few hundred kilobytes) at good quality usually looks better than uploading a huge original or an already heavily compressed one.

Why your photos look worse after posting

Platforms recompress every image to save bandwidth, and they’re most aggressive with oversized uploads they have to shrink a lot. Three things help your pictures survive. First, upload at or slightly above the recommended size, so the platform scales down a little rather than a lot. Second, avoid uploading files that have already been compressed several times, such as images saved from chat apps; start from the original. Third, keep fine textures and tiny text to a minimum on thumbnails and stories, where heavy compression shows first. For the format details behind this, see JPG vs PNG vs WebP vs AVIF.

Common mistakes

• Text too close to the edges. Stories, banners and thumbnails all have areas covered by buttons, profile photos or timestamps. Leave margins.
• Tiny text on thumbnails. Thumbnails are often viewed at a few centimeters wide. Use a few large words, not a sentence.
• Uploading the same image everywhere. A 16:9 photo posted to a 4:5 feed loses its sides. Five minutes of cropping per platform pays off.
• Upscaling small images. Enlarging a small picture to 1080 pixels won’t add detail. Start from the largest original you have.
• Forgetting location data. Many platforms strip metadata on upload, but not every service you share through does. See how to remove location data from photos.

Profile pictures

Almost every platform shows profile photos as a small circle, even if you upload a square. Crop to 1:1 with your face centered and a little space around it, so nothing important falls outside the circle. A plain or softly blurred background reads best at tiny sizes.

Keeping it private and quick

All of the tools mentioned here work inside your browser, so unreleased campaign images and client photos are never uploaded while you prepare them. You can crop a whole batch to the same ratio, adjust any image whose subject isn’t centered, and download everything as a ZIP ready to schedule.