Social media image sizes

Platforms adjust their layouts periodically. These are the current widely-recommended dimensions; for anything business-critical, check the platform's own help pages before a campaign goes out.

Quick reference table

Our social media resizer produces all of these from one source image and returns them as a single ZIP, named by platform and dimensions.

Why ratios matter more than pixels

Platforms scale your upload to fit their layout, so being slightly under the recommended pixel count is rarely fatal. Being the wrong ratio is, because that triggers cropping, and the platform crops from the centre, with no knowledge of where the important part of your image is. This is how heads end up cut off.

There are really only five ratios in use:

• 1:1 square: profile pictures, Instagram squares
• 4:5 portrait: takes up the most vertical space in a feed, which is why it performs well
• 9:16 vertical: anything full-screen on a phone (stories, Reels, Shorts, TikTok)
• 16:9 landscape: video and thumbnails
• 1.91:1 landscape: link previews, which is what Open Graph specifies

Get the ratio right and the pixel count becomes a detail. Get it wrong and no amount of resolution helps.

Open Graph: the one most people miss

When someone shares a link to your site (on social media, in Slack, in WhatsApp, in iMessage), the preview card that appears is controlled by og:image in your page's HTML. Without it, platforms guess, and usually guess badly: your logo, a random inline image, or nothing at all.

<meta property="og:title" content="Your page title">
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two sentences.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og-image.png">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page/">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

Three rules that catch people out:

• The URL must be absolute. A relative path is silently ignored by most platforms.
• Declare width and height. It lets platforms render the card before the image finishes downloading.
• Keep it under about 1 MB. Some platforms refuse to fetch anything larger and fall back to no image.

Because these previews are often the first thing anyone sees of your page, an OG image with legible text at small sizes is worth more attention than most people give it.

Safe zones and cropping

Several placements have areas where your content will be obscured by interface elements. Keep anything important away from them.

When resizing, the choice between cover and contain matters here. Cover fills the frame and crops the overflow, which suits photographs. Contain fits the whole image and pads the remainder with a colour you choose, which suits logos and product shots where nothing may be cut.

File size and quality

Every platform re-compresses what you upload. You have no control over their encoder. What you can control is what you hand them, and the rule is counter-intuitive: upload a clean, high-quality file and let them compress it once. Uploading an already heavily-compressed image means their encoder compounds damage that is already there.

• Export at the exact recommended dimensions, not larger.
• Use quality 85-90 rather than 100. The difference is invisible after their re-encode, and the upload is faster.
• Use PNG only when the image contains sharp text or needs transparency. Photographs should be JPG or WebP.
• Check the platform's file size cap. YouTube thumbnails, for instance, must be under 2 MB.