Social media image sizes — a cheat sheet that actually saves you time
Updated 6 min read
Every platform crops differently, and every year someone publishes a new list of “official” sizes. Most of that churn does not matter. What matters is hitting the aspect ratio the platform expects, giving it enough pixels that it never has to upscale, and staying under the file size it will silently re-compress.
The sizes worth remembering
These are the values that were correct as of August 2026. Platforms adjust them, so treat the ratios as stable and the pixel counts as a comfortable floor.
| Where | Pixels | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram feed, square | 1080 × 1080 | 1:1 |
| Instagram feed, portrait | 1080 × 1350 | 4:5 |
| Instagram feed, landscape | 1080 × 566 | 1.91:1 |
| Instagram Stories / Reels | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 |
| TikTok | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 |
| YouTube thumbnail | 1280 × 720 | 16:9 |
| YouTube channel banner | 2560 × 1440 | 16:9 |
| X post image | 1600 × 900 | 16:9 |
| X header | 1500 × 500 | 3:1 |
| LinkedIn post | 1200 × 627 | 1.91:1 |
| LinkedIn personal background | 1584 × 396 | 4:1 |
| Facebook shared link | 1200 × 630 | 1.91:1 |
| Facebook page cover | 851 × 315 | 2.7:1 |
| Pinterest pin | 1000 × 1500 | 2:3 |
| Blog / Open Graph card | 1200 × 630 | 1.91:1 |
| Square profile picture (most sites) | 400 × 400 | 1:1 |
Two of these deserve a footnote. YouTube thumbnails are capped at 2 MB — a 1280 × 720 JPEG at quality 85 lands around 150–300 KB, so you have plenty of headroom, but a PNG export of a busy screenshot can blow past the limit. And banners with a “safe area” (YouTube’s 1546 × 423 centre, LinkedIn’s edges) get cropped hard on mobile: keep text away from the edges rather than trying to design for every viewport.
Rule 1 — pick the ratio, then let the width follow
Cropping is the decision that changes your image; resizing is just arithmetic afterwards. If you crop to 4:5 first, any width you choose after that is correct by construction — 1080 × 1350, 1440 × 1800, it does not matter.
This is why the crop tool has ratio presets. Set 4:5, drag the box until the subject sits where you want it, and only then set a width. Doing it the other way round — resizing to 1080 wide and then cropping — throws away pixels you might have wanted.
Rule 2 — 1080 px on the short edge is the practical floor
Almost every platform stores something close to 1080 px wide for feed images and roughly doubles that for high-density screens. Uploading a 640 px image guarantees a soft, slightly mushy result, because the platform upscales it. Uploading a 4000 px image does not make it sharper than 1080 — the platform downscales it with its own algorithm, which you do not control.
So: 1080 px minimum, 2160 px if you want to be generous, and no more. Beyond that you are only paying in upload time and letting someone else’s resampler make the decisions.
Rule 3 — export smaller than the platform’s re-compression threshold
Every upload gets re-encoded. If you hand over a 6 MB file, the platform compresses aggressively and you see the artefacts. If you hand over a well-made 400 KB JPEG, it has much less work to do and the result usually looks better than the “maximum quality” version you were protecting.
A reasonable target for a feed image is 200–600 KB. For a thumbnail, under 300 KB. Quality 80–85 on JPEG gets you there for almost any photograph.
Doing all of this in one pass
The whole point of a batch tool is that you set the ratio and size once and apply it to everything. A workflow that holds up for a set of photos:
- Drop the folder in and select the files you want.
- Crop with a ratio preset — 1:1 for a grid, 4:5 for reach, 9:16 for Stories. Leave “apply to all selected files” on so the crop happens from the centre of each image.
- Set the longest edge to 1080 (or the width from the table above).
- Convert to JPEG at quality 82, check the estimated size, and export the batch as a ZIP.
If you need the same photo set at two ratios — a square for the grid and a 9:16 for Stories — run the batch twice rather than trying to find a crop that works for both. It takes about thirty seconds and the results are far better than a compromise crop.
What about DPI?
Nothing on a screen uses DPI. A 1080 × 1080 image is 1080 × 1080 whether its metadata claims 72 or 300 DPI, and social platforms ignore the field entirely. DPI only becomes real when you print: multiply the physical size in inches by the target DPI to get the pixels you need. A 4 × 6 inch print at 300 DPI is 1200 × 1800 pixels — that is the only sense in which “300 DPI” is a size.
One more thing about metadata
Exporting through a browser canvas strips EXIF, which means your GPS coordinates, camera serial number and timestamps do not travel with the file. Most platforms strip location data anyway, but “most” is not “all”, and files also get forwarded outside platforms. If you have ever shared a photo taken at home, this is a good habit to keep.