Image dimensions that actually work on every platform

Every list of social media image sizes goes out of date, because platforms change them. What does not change is the reasoning behind the numbers, so it is worth having both.

Aspect ratio matters more than pixel count

Platforms crop to a ratio, then scale to whatever pixel size they serve. Get the ratio right and the wrong pixel count only costs you sharpness. Get the ratio wrong and your image gets cropped — and platforms crop from the centre, so whatever mattered at the edges is gone.

The ratios in practice are: 1:1 square, 4:5 portrait, 9:16 full-screen vertical, 16:9 widescreen, and 1.91:1 for link previews.

That last one is a strange number because it is what Open Graph settled on — it is roughly 1200 × 630 — and it is now the de facto standard for link previews everywhere.

The numbers

Instagram — square post 1080 × 1080; portrait post 1080 × 1350 (this is the one that takes the most vertical space in the feed); Stories and Reels 1080 × 1920.

Facebook — feed image 1200 × 630; Stories 1080 × 1920; cover photo 820 × 312, though it is cropped differently on mobile and desktop, so keep anything important well inside the middle.

X / Twitter — in-stream image 1600 × 900; the link preview card uses 1200 × 628.

LinkedIn — post image 1200 × 627; company cover 1128 × 191, which is an extreme ratio that almost nothing survives except flat colour and a logo.

YouTube — thumbnail 1280 × 720, and it must be under 2 MB.

Pinterest — 1000 × 1500, a 2:3 ratio. Pinterest is the outlier that genuinely rewards taller images.

Open Graph / link previews — 1200 × 630. This is the image that shows when your page is shared anywhere, including WhatsApp, Slack and Discord, and it is the one most sites forget to set.

Upload larger than the display size

Every platform re-encodes what you upload. If you give it exactly the display size, it re-compresses at that size and softness shows. Give it roughly double the display dimensions at the correct ratio and the downscale absorbs the compression damage.

There is a ceiling — most platforms cap uploads around 4000–5000 pixels and will reject or aggressively resize beyond that. Double is the sweet spot; ten times is wasted bandwidth.

The safe area

The same image is displayed at different crops in different places: a feed, a profile grid, a notification, a share card. The only defence is to keep the content that matters in the middle.

A practical rule: assume the outer 10% on every side may be cropped away. Never put text, faces or a logo in that band. For anything that appears as both a wide banner and a square thumbnail, design for the square and let the wide version have decorative space at the sides.

Text on images

Two things go wrong. Text set at a comfortable size on your monitor becomes unreadable on a phone at feed scale — as a rough guide, text should be at least 4% of the image height. And text is exactly what lossy compression handles worst, so an image with text on it wants a higher quality setting than a plain photo, or a lossless format.

If the text is the point of the image, consider whether it should be actual text on the page instead. It stays sharp at every size, and it can be read by search engines and screen readers, which text baked into a picture cannot.

Which format to upload

JPG for photographs and PNG for anything with text or flat colour, at reasonably high quality. The platform will convert to whatever it serves — usually WebP — so uploading WebP or AVIF yourself gains nothing and occasionally causes an upload to be rejected.

The only exception is transparency: if it matters, PNG is the only one of the two that keeps it, and even then most platforms flatten it onto white.

A workflow that survives platform changes

1. Keep one high-resolution master image, well above any platform size.
2. Crop to the ratio you need, not the pixel size — ratio is what the platform enforces.
3. Resize to roughly double the display dimensions.
4. Export at quality 85 or so, or lossless if there is text.
5. Keep important content out of the outer 10%.

When a platform changes its numbers next quarter, you re-crop from the master rather than trying to rescue an image that was already cropped and compressed for the old spec.