Social Media Image Sizes: The 2026 Cheat Sheet
Posting a photo at the wrong size is the quietest way to make good work look careless. The platform does not reject it. It crops it, or pads it, or squeezes it, and it does so silently, and the first you know about it is that the top of someone's head is missing or your logo has been cut in half.
This is a list of the sizes that actually matter right now, the safe areas that most cheat sheets leave out, and what to do when your photo simply is not the shape the platform wants. You can work through it with the free Social Media Image Resizer, which shows you the crop before you commit to it.
Why the size matters more than it sounds
Three separate things go wrong when an image is the wrong size, and only one of them is obvious.
The obvious one is cropping. Upload a landscape photo where a square is expected and the platform takes the middle and throws the sides away. It does not know that the important part was on the left.
The second is softness. If your image is smaller than the size the platform displays, it gets scaled up, and scaling up invents detail that was never there. Text goes fuzzy first, which is why a screenshot posted at the wrong size looks so much worse than a photograph does.
The third is recompression. Every platform re-encodes what you upload. Give it a file that is already heavily compressed and it compresses that again, and the artefacts compound. Uploading at the recommended size, at a reasonable quality, gives the platform less reason to touch it.
The sizes, platform by platform
A square post is 1080 x 1080. A portrait post is 1080 x 1350, which is the tallest a feed post is allowed to be and takes up noticeably more of the screen than a square, which is why most accounts default to it. A landscape post is 1080 x 566. Stories and Reels are 1080 x 1920.
Posts follow the same three shapes as Instagram: 1080 x 1080 square, 1080 x 1359 portrait, 1080 x 566 landscape. The cover photo on a profile or page is 851 x 315. An event cover is 1920 x 1005. Stories are 1080 x 1920.
YouTube
A video thumbnail is 1280 x 720, and it is worth treating this as the most important image you make, because it is the one competing for a click. A channel banner is 2560 x 1440 - see the safe area section below before you design one.
A personal profile banner is 1584 x 396. A company page cover is 1128 x 191. A post image is 1200 x 627 for the familiar wide card, or 1080 x 1350 if you want a portrait post that occupies more of the feed on a phone.
X
The header photo is 1500 x 500. In the timeline, 1280 x 720 is the standard landscape shape, 1080 x 1080 square, and 720 x 1280 portrait.
Pinterest and TikTok
A Pinterest pin is 1000 x 1500, a 2:3 shape, and tall pins of 1000 x 2100 are allowed and often perform well. A TikTok video or cover image is 1080 x 1920, the same as every other vertical format.
The bit most cheat sheets skip: safe areas
A recommended size tells you what to upload. It does not tell you what will actually be visible, and for banners those are two different things.
The YouTube channel banner is the worst offender. You upload 2560 x 1440, but a television shows all of it, a desktop browser shows a wide central strip, and a phone shows only the middle 1546 x 423. Everything outside that centre rectangle is decoration that some viewers will never see. Your channel name, your logo and any text belong inside it.
Facebook cover photos have a milder version of the same problem: the crop differs between desktop and mobile, so the left and right edges are unreliable. LinkedIn profile banners are partly covered by your profile photo in the lower left on most layouts, so do not put anything there.
The general rule is simple. On any banner, treat the middle as the only part that exists and the edges as atmosphere.
When your photo is the wrong shape
This is the real problem, and there are only three honest answers.
Crop it. Zoom in until the picture fills the frame and accept that the edges go. This is right when your subject is central and the edges carry nothing. The thing that makes it work is being able to choose which edges go, which is why dragging the picture inside a fixed frame beats letting a platform take the middle by default.
Pad it with a colour. Nothing is lost, but the picture sits smaller on screen. This suits product shots on white, screenshots, diagrams, and anything with text close to the edge.
Fill the space with a blurred copy of the picture. The photo sits at its full width in the middle and an enlarged, blurred version of itself fills above and below. This is what almost every professionally made vertical post does with landscape source material, because the frame stays full without cropping anything away. If you are turning a wide photo into a Story, this is usually the right answer.
Which format, and how big is too big
Save photographs as JPG. It is smaller than PNG by a large margin and, at a sensible quality, nobody can see the difference. WebP is smaller again and every current browser handles it. PNG is for transparency, and for images that are mostly text or interface - a screenshot saved as JPG develops a halo around every letter.
On quality, the setting is a coarse dial rather than a precise one, and the gap between 90 and 75 is usually invisible on a phone while the file can be half the size. If you are uploading over a weak connection, that matters.
Do not go the other way and upload something enormous. The platform will recompress it anyway, so a 12 MB image gains you nothing over a well-made 800 KB one.
Five mistakes that quietly cost you
Designing a banner edge to edge. Covered above. The middle is the only safe ground.
Reusing one square for everything. A square posted as a Story leaves two grey bands and looks like an afterthought. It takes seconds to make the vertical version.
Uploading a screenshot as a JPG. Text goes fuzzy. Use PNG.
Editing an export instead of the original. Each JPG save recompresses, so editing yesterday's export and saving again stacks the damage. Keep the original and go back to it.
Forgetting the EXIF data. Photos from a phone carry the camera, the date and often the exact GPS coordinates where the picture was taken. Any tool that re-saves an image through a browser canvas drops all of it, which is a quiet reason to run a photo through a resizer before posting it.
Doing it in one place
Everything above is one job: take a picture, decide what stays in frame, and produce the exact pixel size a platform expects. The Social Media Image Resizer has all of these sizes built in and shows the output as you position the picture, so the crop is a decision you make rather than one that happens to you. If you are building a profile grid or a swipeable post instead, the Instagram Grid Planner and the Instagram Carousel Splitter handle those, and the Image Editor covers the rest of the tidying up.
All of them are free, need no sign-up, and never upload your picture anywhere.
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