Image dimensions for every social platform in 2026

Social platforms publish recommended image sizes, change them without announcement, and then crop anything that does not match. The result is a familiar set of small failures: a headline sliced in half, a logo cropped out of a corner, a face cut off at the forehead by a square thumbnail.

Here are the sizes that matter, and — more useful — the small number of rules that make the list mostly unnecessary.

The rule that beats the list

The aspect ratio is what is load-bearing. The pixel count is a quality setting.

Upload an image with the right shape at slightly the wrong resolution and the platform scales it, costing you a negligible amount of sharpness. Upload one with the wrong shape and the platform crops it, using an algorithm that has no idea which part of your image carried the meaning.

That is where every visible failure comes from. The platform is not being careless; it has been given an image it cannot display and is taking the only action available.

There are, in practice, five ratios:

Master those five and platform-specific numbers become a lookup rather than a memory test.

The reference table

Current recommended dimensions, in pixels.

Instagram

Feed portrait at 4:5 occupies the most vertical space in the feed of any allowed format, which is why it has become the default for anything that needs to be read rather than glanced at.

TikTok

YouTube

The channel banner is the trickiest asset on any platform. The full 2560 × 1440 is only ever shown on a television. On desktop the visible strip is roughly the central 1546 × 423; on mobile, roughly 1546 × 423 of a different crop. Everything that must be legible belongs in the middle sixth of the image, and everything else is decoration for a viewport most people never use.

X

LinkedIn

The 6:1 page banner is the most extreme ratio in common use. Cropping a normal photograph to it keeps about a sixth of the frame's height, so the vertical position of the crop is the entire design decision.

Facebook

Pinterest

Pinterest is the outlier: 2:3 rather than 4:5, and taller pins genuinely perform differently because the feed is a vertical mosaic rather than a single column.

Web and email

The Open Graph image is the one most often neglected and the one with the widest reach — it is what appears whenever your link is shared anywhere, including in messaging apps that render no other image.

The safe zones nobody tells you about

A 9:16 Story is full-screen, and the platform draws its own interface on top of it. Your profile name across the top; reply controls, captions and buttons across the bottom. Roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels of a 1920-pixel frame are contested.

Keep text and faces in the middle band, and use the outer regions for background. Otherwise the app will place a Send button over your headline, and it will look like your mistake.

Similar zones exist elsewhere:

• YouTube thumbnails get a duration badge in the bottom right, and a progress bar along the bottom edge for watched videos. Keep the lower right corner clear.
• LinkedIn and Facebook page banners are overlapped by the profile photo, usually on the left.
• Any square feed thumbnail may be centre-cropped from a 4:5 post in grid views. Do not place anything essential in the top or bottom fifth of a portrait post.

Ratio conflicts and how to resolve them

One image cannot be 4:5 and 16:9 simultaneously. There are exactly three options, and the third is usually right.

Crop. Best when the subject occupies a small part of the frame and there is room to lose. Worst when the composition is the point.

Pad. Add bars of background colour to reach the target ratio. Honest, safe, and often the correct answer for a logo or product cut-out. It looks deliberate when the padding matches your brand colour and accidental when it is white by default.

Shoot or design wide, crop per destination. Compose with a generous margin, keep the subject centred, and crop each destination from the same source. This is what actually works when the same asset has to appear in six places, and it is a decision made before the photograph exists rather than after.

The workflow that saves the afternoon

Publishing one image across platforms is not one task repeated. It is a series of genuinely different compositions that happen to share a source: a square feed post, a full-screen vertical Story, a wide video thumbnail, a letterbox banner.

Producing them by opening an editor, cropping by eye, exporting, renaming and repeating is where an afternoon goes — and the results drift, because your judgement about where to crop is not identical at image forty as at image one.

Three things make this tractable:

1. Start from the largest source you have. Every derivative is a crop and a downscale from the master. Downscaling is nearly free in quality terms; upscaling is not.
2. Batch the crops from one source. Selecting every destination once and exporting the whole set as a ZIP replaces the repetition with a single decision, and the crops stay consistent because they came from the same rule.
3. Check the extreme ratios by hand. The 6:1 banner and the 3:1 header are where automatic framing is most likely to disagree with you, because a third of a portrait photograph's height is the difference between a face and a chin.

For one-off work with an unusual target, a manual crop to a fixed ratio is faster than any batch tool. The batch is for the set.

Resolution, quality and the re-encode

Every platform re-encodes what you upload. You do not control the codec, the quality setting, or the number of times it happens.

What you do control is what the compressor starts with. Uploading at the recommended dimensions rather than half of them gives the platform's encoder room to work, which is why a full-size upload usually looks better after processing than a smaller one that looked identical before.

Two practical consequences:

• Do not pre-compress aggressively. Saving your Story frame at quality 60 to make it smaller, and then having the platform re-encode that, stacks two generations of loss. Upload a clean quality-85 image and let the platform do its one pass.
• Do not upload absurdly large images either. A 6000-pixel-wide file for a 1080-pixel slot is uploaded in full and then thrown away. It is slow on mobile data and buys nothing — scale it to the target width first.

The format matters less here than anywhere else, precisely because of the re-encode. Upload PNG where transparency needs preserving through the pipeline, JPEG or WebP otherwise, and spend your attention on dimensions instead. If you want the reasoning behind that, WebP vs AVIF vs JPEG covers where each format earns its place.

Why the sizes keep changing

Platforms change image dimensions when they change the feed, and they change the feed constantly. A new video format, a redesigned profile, a shift from horizontal to vertical consumption — each one renames and re-shapes the assets.

Which is the argument for internalising the five ratios rather than the twenty-five pixel pairs. The numbers churn. The shapes are set by the shape of a phone, and that has not changed in a decade.