Guides

The Social Media Image Size Guide for Every Platform

A social media image size guide really comes down to a handful of aspect ratios, not the forty-odd pixel dimensions most charts throw at you. Pick the correct ratio for the slot, export at the largest size that ratio supports, and the platform handles the rest.

Every network resizes and recompresses whatever you upload. The dimensions that matter, then, are the ones that keep your image sharp after that downscale and keep your subject inside the crop. This guide gives you those numbers, platform by platform, along with the export settings and safe zones that decide whether a post looks deliberate or thrown together.

Why aspect ratio beats exact pixels

Platforms do not show your file at the pixels you upload. They generate several derivatives from it: a small feed thumbnail, a larger tapped view, sometimes a separate story crop. If the aspect ratio of your file does not match the slot, the platform crops to fit, and it almost never crops where you would. That is how a logo ends up sliced in half or a face gets pinned against the top edge.

So design to the ratio first. Square is 1:1. Portrait feed posts are 4:5. Vertical stories and reels are 9:16. Link preview cards and most landscape posts are 1.91:1. Match the ratio exactly and you control the crop instead of leaving it to an algorithm. Then upload at the largest resolution that ratio supports, so the platform downscales from a clean source rather than stretching a small one up.

Resolution works the same way. Uploading a file larger than strictly needed wastes nothing, because the platform downscales it, and a downscale of a sharp source stays sharp. Uploading a file smaller than the slot forces an upscale, which softens edges and muddies detail. When in doubt, go larger at the right ratio.

There is a display reason to go large too. Most phones and many monitors now pack extra pixels into every inch, so a file that looks adequate by its numbers can still read soft once the screen spreads it across that denser space. Uploading above the minimum gives the display something to work with.

One caveat for carousels and multi-image posts: lock every frame to the same ratio. Most feeds set the crop from the first image in the set, so a square opener followed by a portrait frame leaves the taller images clipped top and bottom. Choose one ratio for the whole sequence and the swipe stays clean from the first card to the last.

The sizes that actually matter, by platform

These are the dimensions worth saving. Where a platform supports more than one, the first listed is the one most of your posts should use. Platforms adjust these numbers from time to time, so treat the list as a strong default and confirm against the current upload dialog whenever a layout looks off.

Instagram

Facebook

X

LinkedIn

YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest

Profile photos and avatars

Profile photos display as circles or rounded squares on most networks, so center your mark and leave padding around it. A single square source works almost everywhere: 400 by 400 pixels is large enough for every avatar slot and downscales cleanly to the small sizes a feed actually shows. Avoid fine text in an avatar, because at the size it renders in a feed, small type becomes unreadable.

Safe zones: why your text keeps getting cut

Vertical formats are where otherwise good images fall apart. On stories and reels, the top and bottom of the frame sit underneath the platform's own interface: the account name up top, the caption and action buttons along the bottom. Put anything important there and it vanishes behind a Follow button or a line of caption text.

Keep headlines and logos inside the middle of a 9:16 frame, roughly the central two thirds. A YouTube banner is the strictest case, because its viewable area shrinks hard on phones, leaving the 1546 by 423 center strip as the only region guaranteed to show everywhere. Treat safe zones as fixed constraints and build the layout around them from the first draft, not as a cleanup step at the end.

One more habit worth building: keep any essential message in the caption as well as the image. Text baked into a graphic is invisible to screen readers and is the first thing to get clipped on the platforms that resize hardest, so let the image reinforce the words rather than carry them alone.

Export settings that survive compression

The crop is only half the job. Compression is the other half, and a few settings keep your work from turning to mush on the way in:

Text and fine lines suffer most under compression. When a design is mostly type on a solid background, PNG or WebP holds the edges where a JPEG would smear halos around every letter.

Build one asset set, not forty exports

You do not need a unique file for every slot. Most campaigns ride on four master ratios: 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, and 1.91:1. Design the key message to read in all four, lay each one out with the safe zones already respected, and you cover nearly every placement across the major networks with a single coherent set.

There is a fifth ratio you should not skip: the link preview. When a page from your site gets shared, the Open Graph image at 1200 by 630 is what renders in the feed. Set it deliberately on each page, or the platform grabs whatever image it finds first, often a stray logo or an ad banner. That one image is often a visitor's first impression of the page, so it deserves the same care as the post creative itself.

This is the part that scales. When the specs live in a shared template with the ratios and safe zones drawn in already, anyone on the team can turn out on-brand assets without re-checking a chart every time. That production discipline is what converts a size guide into a repeatable workflow, and it is the layer we standardize inside the content systems on the sites we build.