Instagram is the platform with the most placements and the most aggressive re-cropping. Two of its crops are worth designing around; the rest take care of themselves.
Every size above is exported by the resizer at the top of this page. The table is generated from the tool’s own preset definitions, so it cannot describe a size the export does not produce.
Designing for Instagram
The profile grid crops everything to a square
A profile is a square grid, and it centre-crops whatever shape you posted to fill it. A 4:5 portrait post — the tallest shape the feed allows, and the one that occupies the most screen — loses roughly its top and bottom fifth in that grid.
So the shape choice is a trade rather than an optimisation. Portrait wins the feed and loses the grid; square wins the grid and gives up about a quarter of the feed height. If the grid is part of the plan, because the account is a portfolio or the posts read as a set, square is the right default. If each post lives or dies in the feed, portrait is.
Either way, keep the headline and the subject in the middle band and the post works in both places.
A Story is not a full-bleed canvas
The 9:16 Story frame is full-screen, and the app draws its own interface on top: your profile picture and name across the top, the reply field and any captions or link stickers across the bottom. In practice the top and bottom 250 pixels of a 1920-pixel frame are contested.
Keep anything you need read inside the central band, roughly 1080 × 1420, and use the outer regions for background or texture — content that looks intentional when a Send button lands on it.
Leave a deliberate clear space low in the frame for the link or poll sticker you will add after uploading. Stickers are placed in the app, they are large, and a frame that is full to the edges means every sticker covers something.
Carousels and re-encoding
Every frame of a carousel must share one aspect ratio. Mixing a square and a portrait frame does not produce a mixed carousel; it produces a carousel where one of them is cropped.
Upload at the full pixel dimensions rather than a smaller export. Instagram re-encodes everything, and its encoder produces a better result from a large clean source than from one you have already compressed hard. At 1080 pixels wide, keep body text around 36 pixels or larger — small type is the first thing a lossy encoder damages.
1080 pixels wide, with the height set by the shape you want: 1350 for the portrait format that occupies the most feed space, 1080 for a square, and 566 for landscape. Stories and Reels are 1080 × 1920. The exact numbers for every format this tool exports are in the reference table above, generated from the presets themselves rather than typed from memory.
What size is a YouTube thumbnail?
1280 × 720, a 16:9 frame. That is YouTube's recommended size and the one this tool exports. Design for it to be legible at roughly 210 pixels wide, which is how big it will actually be in a sidebar — a thumbnail that only works at full size is a thumbnail that does not work.
How do I resize one image for every platform at once?
Select every destination you need, then export. The tool crops your image separately for each target ratio, resizes each crop to that platform's pixel dimensions, and packages the whole set into one ZIP with descriptive filenames. One upload of effort, one download, every size correct.
Will my subject get cut off?
Not usually. Rather than cropping from the centre, the tool looks for a face in the image and falls back to a saliency estimate — the region with the most visual detail — then places the crop window around that point. You can nudge the framing afterwards if it chose differently from you, which matters most for the extreme ratios like a 1500 × 500 header.
Is this free?
Completely. Every step runs in your browser using WebAssembly codecs, so there is no server cost for us to pass on. No sign-up, no watermark, no cap on how many images or how many sizes. The Pro plan adds AI tools and AVIF output; social resizing stays free.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. Decoding, face detection, cropping, resizing and ZIP creation all happen on your device. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored on our side and nothing needs deleting afterwards — which is what makes this usable for client work and unreleased campaign material.
Does resizing for social media reduce quality?
Downscaling is the safe direction and this tool uses Lanczos resampling, which preserves detail better than the simpler filters most browsers apply by default. The real risk is starting too small: exporting a 1080-pixel image to a 2560-pixel YouTube banner means enlarging, and enlargement cannot add detail that was never captured. Start from the largest original you have.
What is the safe area, and why do my Stories get covered?
A 1080 × 1920 Story is full-screen, and the platform draws its own interface on top of it: your profile and name across the top, and reply controls, captions and buttons across the bottom. Roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels are contested. Keep text and faces in the middle band and use the outer regions for background, or the app will place a Send button over your headline.
Should I export as JPG, PNG or WebP?
The tool picks a sensible output format from your source, keeping PNG where transparency needs preserving and using a lossy format where it does not. For social specifically the choice matters less than people expect, because every platform re-encodes what you upload anyway. What does matter is uploading at the full recommended dimensions, so the platform's own compression starts from a large, clean image.
Why do platforms keep changing their image sizes?
Because the surfaces change. A new full-screen video format, a redesigned profile page or a different feed layout all move the goalposts, and the recommended dimensions follow. That is exactly why the size table on this page is generated from the presets the tool actually exports rather than written into an article: when a preset is updated, the documentation updates with it instead of quietly becoming wrong.