Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
The answer is arithmetic from your canvas and your font size, and the thing that actually breaks a quote card is a last line with one word on it.
No platform limits the text on a carousel image. What limits it is whether anybody can read it at feed size, which makes the answer arithmetic rather than a rule.
Instagram writes an automatic description for every image whether you do or not. Yours replaces it, you get 100 characters, and the field is three taps deep.
Apple's public directory hands out a 600-pixel copy. The 3000×3000 the publisher submitted is at the same address with one number changed.
Bluesky is the one platform that will simply tell you what is on a post. You get every image, the alt text, and the file exactly as it was uploaded.
Threads answers a signed-out request honestly, which makes it one of the easier platforms to get a picture out of. Two details are worth knowing first.
Two different links, two different routes. A post gives you what its link card publishes; a Page gives you its picture at the size Facebook stores.
Instagram publishes a larger copy of every public post's picture so link cards can render it. Here is how to reach it, and why the link stops working.
X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes. The timeline shows you a middling one; the largest is a single word away in the URL.
Pinterest serves every Pin at four fixed widths and keeps the original under a path the interface never links to. Here is how to get the file as uploaded.
Comment-as-hook is a format now. Here is how to draw a TikTok comment card that reads as real, including the Creator chip almost every generator gets wrong.
Draw a Facebook post card for a slide or a client mock-up, in desktop or mobile width, without screenshotting a real feed and cropping four things out of it.