Image dimensions for major social platforms in 2026

Every social platform publishes recommended image sizes, changes them without announcing it, and crops whatever arrives in the wrong shape. The results are familiar: a headline sliced in half, a logo cropped out of a corner, a face cut off at the forehead by a square thumbnail.

The pixel numbers below are current. The five aspect ratios underneath them are what decide whether a composition survives the upload.

Aspect ratio decides, resolution only sets quality

Upload the right shape at slightly the wrong resolution and the platform scales it, costing a little sharpness that nobody will notice. Upload the wrong shape and the platform crops it, using an algorithm with no idea which part of the frame carried the meaning.

That accounts for nearly every visible failure. The platform is not being careless. It has been handed an image it cannot fit in the slot it has, and cropping is the only move available to it.

Five ratios cover almost everything:

Learn those five and the tables below become a lookup rather than something to memorise.

Dimension reference by network

Instagram

Feed portrait (4:5) delivers the greatest vertical area in standard mobile feeds, making it the preferred choice for detailed infographics and product shots.

TikTok

YouTube

Channel banners display across multiple viewports. Television screens show the entire 2560 × 1440 canvas. Desktop monitors display an inner horizontal strip of roughly 1546 × 423 pixels. Mobile displays scale this strip with narrower side borders. Keep all titles, logos, and critical visuals within the central 1546 × 423 safe zone.

X (formerly Twitter)

LinkedIn

A banner near 6:1 keeps about a sixth of an ordinary photograph's height, so the vertical position of the crop is the whole design decision. Place logos and text inside that band deliberately rather than discovering where they landed after the upload.

Facebook

Pinterest

Pinterest's vertical mosaic feed prioritizes the 2:3 ratio rather than standard 4:5 portrait crops.

Web and email metadata

The Open Graph image displays across social networks, chat applications, and forum message embeds when sharing page links. It is the most neglected asset on this page and the one with the widest reach, because it travels wherever the link goes, including to messaging apps that render no other image.

Interface overlay safe zones

A 9:16 story fills the screen, and the platform draws its own interface on top of the image. A profile name and platform controls sit across the top; captions, reply fields, and action buttons run along the bottom. Those regions belong to the app.

• Vertical stories and reels. Roughly the top 250 and bottom 250 pixels of a 1920-pixel frame are contested. Keep text, faces, and product graphics inside the middle 1420-pixel band, and let the outer regions carry background. Otherwise the app puts a Send button across the headline, and it reads as the designer's mistake rather than the platform's layout.
• YouTube thumbnails. A duration badge renders in the bottom-right corner, and a watch-progress bar covers the bottom edge for anyone returning to a video. Keep that corner free of anything that has to be read.
• Profile header banners. A circular avatar overlaps the lower-left corner on most layouts, and the crop differs between desktop and mobile. Put the logo in the centre or on the right.
• Square grid thumbnails. A 4:5 portrait post is centre-cropped to 1:1 in profile grids and some recommendation surfaces, so nothing essential belongs in the top or bottom fifth of a portrait composition.

Managing aspect ratio conflicts

One image cannot be 4:5 and 16:9 at once. There are three ways out, and which one is right depends on what the image contains.

Crop from a generous master. Works when the subject occupies a small part of the frame and there is margin to lose. It fails when the composition is the point, because the ratios pull against each other: 9:16 wants the height that 16:9 has to discard.

Pad to the target ratio. Add bars of background colour until the shape matches. This is the honest answer for a logo, a product cut-out, or a screenshot, where cropping would remove something the viewer needs. Padding in a brand colour looks deliberate; padding in default white looks accidental.

Compose wide and crop per destination. Frame with margin on every side, keep the subject near the centre, and cut each destination from the same source. This is what holds up when one asset has to appear in six places, and it is a decision made before the photograph exists rather than after.

For a set of destinations, batch the crops from one source: choose every target once and export the whole group. The crops stay consistent that way, because judgement about where to cut is not identical at image forty and at image one. For a single unusual target, a manual crop to a fixed ratio is faster than any preset list.

Compression and platform re-encoding

Social networks recompress every uploaded image. The codec, the quality setting, and the number of passes are all theirs. What an uploader controls is what their encoder starts with.

• Avoid heavy pre-compression. Compressing a photo to quality 60 before uploading forces the platform encoder to re-compress previous macroblock artifacts, degrading image sharpness. Its bitrate goes on preserving the damage the first pass introduced. Submit clean, quality-85 images instead.
• Resize to recommended dimensions before upload. Submitting a 24-megapixel camera file (6000 pixels wide) forces the platform's automated pipeline to resize the image using generic downsampling filters, and the whole file crosses the network before most of it is discarded. Downsample to the platform's native pixel width using a local resize tool before upload.
• Worry less about format here than elsewhere. The re-encode overrides the choice anyway: send PNG when transparency has to survive the pipeline, JPEG or WebP otherwise. WebP vs AVIF vs JPEG covers where each format earns its place on pages under your own control, which is where the decision carries weight.

Why the pixel tables keep moving

Platforms resize their assets whenever they redesign a feed, and they redesign constantly: a new video format, a profile refresh, another shift from horizontal to vertical viewing. Each one renames and reshapes a row in the tables above.

The five ratios have not moved in a decade, because they follow the proportions of a phone screen rather than any product decision. Check the pixel numbers before a launch. Treat the shapes as fixed.