Design7 min read
Social Media Image Sizes: One Reference for Everything
Every social media image size that matters, organised by aspect ratio rather than by platform - because the ratio is what stays true when the pixels change.
Social media image sizes look like a list of forty numbers. They are really six aspect ratios, and every placement on every network is one of them. Learn the six and the pixel counts stop mattering — a 4:5 export at sufficient resolution is correct on a feed whatever this season's recommended dimensions happen to be.
Social media image sizes are really six ratios
| Ratio | Where it lives | Common export |
|---|---|---|
| 16:9 | YouTube thumbnails, video, X and Facebook link cards | 1920×1080 |
| 9:16 | Stories, Reels, TikTok, Shorts | 1080×1920 |
| 1:1 | Square feed posts, profile grids, LinkedIn documents | 1080×1080 |
| 4:5 | The tallest allowed feed post on Instagram and Facebook | 1080×1350 |
| 2:3 | Pinterest Pins | 1000×1500 |
| ~1.91:1 | Link preview cards, Open Graph images | 1200×630 |
That is the whole subject. Everything below is detail on where each one applies and what gets covered by interface furniture.
FreeMentioned in this article
Social Image ResizerOne image, cropped to every size the networks actually use.Give the resizer one image and it exports the set. That is the practical answer to this entire page: you do not need to remember the numbers if the export does.
Feed images
4:5 is the most valuable ratio on any feed that allows it. It occupies the most vertical space a single post can claim, which means more of the screen and more time before a thumb moves on. Square is safer for grids; 16:9 wastes space in a vertical feed and should be reserved for link cards and video.
Per-network detail: Instagram image size · Facebook image size · Twitter image sizes for X · LinkedIn image and document sizes.
Vertical video and stories
9:16 everywhere: Stories, Reels, TikTok, Shorts. The trap is not the ratio, it is that the platform draws its own interface on top of your frame — captions, the username, the action rail, the progress bar. Text placed in those regions is covered.
FreeMentioned in this article
Safe Zone GuideWhere each app’s buttons will cover your frame, in pixels.The safe-zone guide shows the covered regions per platform on your own image. Detail: safe zones on social media and TikTok video size.
Thumbnails
YouTube documents 3840×2160 at 16:9, minimum width 640 pixels, JPG or PNG, with a 2 MB limit on mobile and 50 MB on desktop (YouTube Help). The number that matters more is the display size: a sidebar suggestion is around 170 pixels wide, and anything unreadable at that width is decoration.
Pins
Pinterest recommends a 2:3 ratio, "or 1000 x 1500 pixels", with titles up to 100 characters of which roughly the first 40 show in feeds, and descriptions up to 800 characters (Pinterest specs). Pinterest converts uploads to 8-bit RGB JPEG, which is why a PNG in sRGB is the safest thing to upload.
See Pinterest Pin size.
Link preview cards
The 1200×630 Open Graph image is the one asset that appears on every platform at once — shared to X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp and everywhere else that unfurls a URL. It is also the one most often wrong, because it is set once in a template and never looked at again.
FreeMentioned in this article
Link Preview DebuggerWhat X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.The debugger renders the card as each network draws it, from one fetch. See Open Graph tags and link preview not showing.
Profile pictures and headers
The forgotten assets, and the ones seen most often.
| Asset | Ratio | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Profile picture, everywhere | 1:1 | Displayed as a circle on most networks — keep the subject centred and away from the corners |
| YouTube banner | 16:9 | 2048×1152 minimum, with a safe area of 1235×338 for text and logos, 6 MB limit (YouTube Help) |
| Facebook / LinkedIn cover | Wide, network-specific | Cropped differently on mobile and desktop; keep text central |
The YouTube banner is the clearest illustration of why safe zones matter more than dimensions. The image is 2048 pixels wide; the region visible on every device is 1235×338 in the middle of it. Everything outside that is decoration that some viewers see and others never do, and a logo placed in a corner is a logo that is missing on television.
What happens to your file after you upload it
Every network recompresses. That is not negotiable, and it is why two people can upload the same photograph and get visibly different results — the one who uploaded a correctly sized, already-optimised file gets a better outcome than the one who uploaded a 12 MB export and let the platform decide.
Three rules that hold across all of them:
- Match the dimensions, do not exceed them wildly. An 8000-pixel-wide upload is
downscaled by the platform's own algorithm, which is tuned for speed rather than quality. Downscale it yourself first and you control the result.
- Avoid double compression. Export once at high quality from the source, not a
JPEG saved from a JPEG saved from a screenshot.
- Flat colour and text suffer most. Photographs survive recompression
gracefully; screenshots, charts and text-heavy graphics show artefacts quickly. That is a format decision, covered in WebP vs JPEG vs PNG.
Video frames follow the same rules
A video thumbnail, a Reel cover and a Story background are all still images inside a video placement, and they follow the ratio table above: 16:9 for horizontal, 9:16 for vertical, with the platform's interface drawn on top.
Two specific cases catch people out. An Instagram Reel cover appears both as a 9:16 cover and as a cropped tile in the profile grid, so the subject has to survive both crops — see Instagram Reels cover size. And a Story that will carry text needs its text inside the safe area, not merely inside the frame — see Instagram Story size.
A workflow that produces every size once
The reason this subject feels endless is that most people approach it per post: make a thing, discover it is the wrong shape, remake it. The alternative is to decide the shapes once.
Compose at 4:5 or 9:16, whichever is taller for your platform mix. Tall frames crop down to every other ratio; wide frames do not crop up. If your main placement is vertical video, compose 9:16 and take everything else out of it.
Leave a margin you are willing to lose. Roughly 10% on each edge of a vertical frame, more at the bottom where captions and action rails sit. That margin is what makes one composition survive four crops.
Export the set in one pass, not one at a time. This is the part worth automating:
FreeMentioned in this article
Social Image ResizerOne image, cropped to every size the networks actually use.Check the crops before publishing, not after. A cropped Reel cover looks fine in your editor and wrong in the grid. The preview tools exist precisely because the platform's crop is not obvious from the source file.
Then compress. Last step, always — compressing before cropping wastes the quality you were protecting.
FreeMentioned in this article
Image CompressorSee the saving and the damage side by side, then pick.The banner that is cropped four ways
Channel art is the one asset where the upload size and the design size are different numbers, and where getting that wrong is invisible until somebody opens the channel on a phone.
You upload 2560×1440. A television shows all of it, a desktop browser shows a 2560×423 strip, a tablet 1855×423, and a phone 1546×423 — which is 17% of the file. Everything that has to be read belongs in that smallest window, and everything outside it is decoration for a device almost nobody browses on. YouTube banner size draws all four crops.
Which sizes are worth memorising
Almost none. If you retain three numbers, make them these:
- 1080 — the short edge for anything going in a feed or a story.
- 1200×630 — the link preview card, because it is the one asset shared everywhere
and the one nobody checks.
- 1235×338 — the YouTube banner safe area, because it is the only asset where the
visible region is dramatically smaller than the file.
Everything else is a ratio, and a ratio is easier to remember than a number. When a platform changes its recommendation - and they do, quietly - a file exported at the right ratio and a reasonable resolution keeps working. A file exported at last year's exact pixel dimensions is the one that starts looking soft.
Getting the file right, not just the frame
Correct dimensions with a 6 MB file still produces a bad post: platforms recompress aggressively, and the visible damage is worse when the upload is oversized.
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| File too large, visibly recompressed | Compress it first |
| Wrong format for the content | WebP vs JPEG vs PNG |
| Ratio maths by hand | Aspect ratio calculator |
FreeMentioned in this article
Image CompressorSee the saving and the damage side by side, then pick.What is the best image size for social media?
There is no single one. Export at 1080 pixels on the short edge and produce the ratios you need: 4:5 for feeds, 9:16 for stories and vertical video, 16:9 for thumbnails and link cards, 1:1 for grids, 2:3 for Pinterest.
Do social media image sizes change often?
The pixel recommendations drift; the aspect ratios almost never do. That is why this reference is organised by ratio - a 9:16 export has been correct for vertical video across every platform that has ever had it.
What size should an Open Graph image be?
1200×630, roughly 1.91:1. It is used for link previews on nearly every platform, so it is worth getting right once.
Can one image work everywhere?
One source image can, if you compose with margin and export crops from it. One exported file cannot - a 16:9 image in a 9:16 slot is letterboxed or cropped to nothing.
The rest of the free toolkit, organised by the job it does, is in the free creator tools you actually need.
Turn one image into every size you need with the social image resizer.
Put it to work
Tools for the job you just read about
Free to run, most of them without an account.
FreeImages & video
Social Image Resizer
One image, cropped to every size the networks actually use.
Resize →
FreePreviews
Safe Zone Guide
Where each app’s buttons will cover your frame, in pixels.
Show safe zones →
FreePreviews
Link Preview Debugger
What X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.
Preview the URL →11 runs
FreeImages & video
Image Compressor
See the saving and the damage side by side, then pick.
Compress →
FreePreviews
Google SERP Snippet Preview
See your title and description as a Google result — on a desktop and a phone.
Preview →5 runs
FreeUtilities
Social Media URL Cleaner
Strip the tracking off a link — and see what each parameter was telling somebody.
Clean →1 runs
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