Image sizes for social media, checked against each platform’s help pages

Every social platform publishes the image sizes it wants, and most size charts on the web drift away from them within a year. This one is short on purpose: every number below comes from the platform’s own help or developer pages, each row links to the page it came from, and the same list powers the presets in our image resizer, so the guide and the tool can’t disagree.

The sizes, platform by platform

We checked every row against its source on October 8, 2026. Platforms change their layouts without much notice, so if a row looks out of date, the linked page is the authority, not us.

Two rows deserve a word. The Instagram square size uses the 1,080-pixel width Instagram states, combined with a 1:1 ratio that sits inside the 1.91:1 to 3:4 range it documents; Instagram doesn’t list “1080 × 1080” in so many words. And the Stories and feed sizes for Meta come from Meta’s Ads Guide, which is written for ads but is the only place Meta publishes a pixel size for those placements.

Aspect ratio vs pixel size

An aspect ratio is the shape of an image: width divided by height. A pixel size is how much detail it carries. 1080 × 1440 and 2160 × 2880 are the same shape (3:4) at different sizes. 1080 × 1080 and 1080 × 1440 are the same width in different shapes.

The ratio decides whether the platform has to crop your picture. The pixel size decides whether it has to scale it. Getting the ratio right matters most, because a crop removes parts of the picture you probably wanted, while a scale only changes how sharp it looks.

Ratios like 1.91:1 are just the division written out: 1200 ÷ 630 ≈ 1.905, and 1080 ÷ 566 ≈ 1.908, which is why both get called 1.91:1. You can turn any ratio into pixels with one multiplication. At Instagram’s 1,080-pixel width, a 3:4 portrait is 1080 × 4 ÷ 3 = 1,440 pixels tall, and a 1.91:1 landscape is 1080 ÷ 1.91 ≈ 565.4, which Instagram gives as 566.

A phone camera rarely shoots in the shape a platform wants. Take a 12-megapixel phone photo of 4032 × 3024 pixels, which is 4:3. None of the rows in the table is 4:3, so almost every upload from a phone needs either a crop or some empty space added, and it’s better if you choose which.

Why platforms resize your upload

Platforms serve your image to phones, laptops and TVs, so they keep it within the sizes their layouts use. Instagram is unusually clear about what happens: it keeps a photo at its original resolution if it is between 320 and 1,080 pixels wide and its ratio is between 1.91:1 and 3:4. If the photo is wider, Instagram sizes it down to 1,080 pixels. If it is narrower, Instagram enlarges it to 320. If the ratio is outside the range, the photo is cropped to fit.

Every resize produces new pixels, and those pixels have to be saved again. When the format is lossy, like JPG, each save approximates a little more detail. You can’t stop a platform from processing your file, but you can remove the reasons to resize it. Upload at the size and shape it documents and there is less left for it to change.

File size plays a part too. Facebook’s help page says a Page cover photo “loads fastest as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes.” LinkedIn’s Pages help suggests a high-resolution JPEG rather than a PNG for the best cover image. If you need to hit a byte budget like Facebook’s, the image compressor has a target-size mode: ask for files smaller than 100 KB and it searches for the highest quality that fits.

Safe zones and covered corners

Some placements cover part of your image with buttons, names or a profile picture. Where a platform documents this, here is what it says:

• Instagram Stories ads: Meta suggests leaving roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% on each side free of text and logos. On a 1440 × 2560 image that is about 358 pixels at the top, 896 at the bottom and 86 on each side, which leaves a box of about 1267 × 1306 pixels for anything people must read.
• YouTube channel banner: at the 2048 × 1152 minimum, the safe area for text and logos is 1235 × 338 pixels. That is about 60% of the width and 29% of the height, because the same banner is cropped differently on TVs, computers and phones.
• Facebook Page cover: the left-hand side is partly covered by the profile picture, which overlaps the cover by about 40 pixels on mobile. Facebook also shows the cover at a 16:9 ratio on computers and 2.4:1 on mobile, so the edges of an 851 × 315 file won’t always be visible.
• LinkedIn Page cover: LinkedIn says to keep key details away from the edges, especially the lower-right corner, since covers may be trimmed on different screens.

The practical rule is the same everywhere: keep words and faces toward the middle and let the edges carry background.

Crop to fill or fit inside: the arithmetic

When the shapes don’t match, you have three choices. The resize tool offers all three when you pick a preset.

• Crop to fill scales the image until it covers the whole frame, then trims the overflow equally from both sides.
• Fit inside with background scales the image until the whole picture fits, then fills the gap with a color you choose.
• Stretch forces the image into the frame and distorts it. It exists for completeness.

A centered crop is a guess about where your subject is. If someone is standing near the edge, crop by hand first: the crop tool has presets for 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, 9:16, 16:9 and 1.91:1, and you can drag the box where you want it. A 3:4 crop of a 4032 × 3024 photo is 2268 × 3024 (3024 × 3 ÷ 4 = 2268). The crop happens at full resolution, so you can then resize it to exactly 1080 × 1440 without losing anything else.

When a 2× export helps (and when it doesn’t)

High-density (HiDPI or Retina) screens use several physical pixels to draw each CSS pixel; browsers report the ratio as devicePixelRatio. On a screen where that ratio is 2, an image laid out 600 pixels wide can use 1,200 pixels of detail. Some platforms build this into their advice and some don’t:

• Link previews: Meta asks for at least 1200 × 630 “for the best display on high resolution devices” and gives 600 × 315 as the minimum for a large preview. That is exactly 2×.
• Facebook Page profile picture: it displays at 176 × 176 on computers and 196 × 196 on smartphones, but Facebook recommends uploading 320 × 320.
• YouTube thumbnails: YouTube says the image “should be as large as possible” and recommends 3840 × 2160 for videos.
• Instagram feed: anything wider than 1,080 pixels is sized down to 1,080, so a 2× export (2,160 pixels wide) gives Instagram more to throw away and nothing extra to show.

So export at the size in the table. Going bigger only helps where the platform says it keeps the extra pixels. Upscaling a small image to reach a size adds pixels but not detail, which is why the resizer has a “don’t enlarge” option.

A five-minute workflow

1. Find your placement in the table and note the size and ratio.
2. If the subject isn’t centered, crop to that ratio first with the crop tool.
3. Open the resize tool, choose the preset, and pick crop to fill or fit inside. You can resize a whole batch at once.
4. If the platform gives a file-size limit, run the result through the compressor with a target size.
5. Check the upload on a phone, where covered corners and tight crops show up first.

All three tools run in your browser. Your photos are processed on your own device and are never uploaded to PixWrench. They can also remove metadata such as GPS location as they save, which is worth doing before you post anything publicly.

Written and checked by the PixWrench team against the sources listed above. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we’ll check it and note the fix in the changelog.