Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet: Every Platform in 2026

Social platforms do not publish one tidy list of image dimensions, and the numbers they do publish are scattered across help centres that update without notice. This page collects the current dimensions for every major platform in one place, and — more usefully — explains the rules underneath them, so you can work out the right size yourself when a platform changes something next quarter.

How to read these numbers

Before the tables, three concepts that make the whole subject click. Get these and you will stop needing cheat sheets.

Aspect ratio decides cropping; pixel width decides sharpness. These are independent problems. A platform first crops your image to the ratio its layout expects, then scales the result to fit the display slot. If you supply the wrong ratio, something gets cut off — often the top of someone's head. If you supply the right ratio but too few pixels, nothing is cut off but the image looks soft. Ratio errors are destructive; resolution errors are merely ugly.

Display size is not upload size. Facebook renders your profile picture at 170 pixels wide on desktop, but you should not upload a 170-pixel file. Platforms store a larger master and generate several sized derivatives from it. Upload at the recommended size — which is usually two to four times the display size — and let the platform downscale, because its downscaling is better than upscaling from something too small.

Every upload is re-encoded. No major platform serves your original file. Each one re-encodes to its own JPEG or WebP settings to control bandwidth. This is why an image that looked perfect in Photoshop can look mottled in a feed: you are seeing generational loss from two rounds of lossy compression. The defence is to upload from a high-quality source rather than from an already-squeezed JPEG, and to keep detail-heavy content (fine text, gradients, noise) to a minimum.

Instagram

Instagram is the strictest platform about aspect ratio and the most aggressive about re-compression, so it is worth getting exactly right.

The 4:5 grid change catches people out

Instagram's profile grid used to crop every post to a square thumbnail. It now crops to 4:5 portrait. If you have been designing square posts with content near the edges, those posts are fine in feed but may be cropped top and bottom in your grid, because a square is being fitted into a taller frame. The practical consequence: design at 4:5, and keep anything essential inside the central square so it survives both layouts.

Story safe zones

A 1080 × 1920 story is not fully usable. Instagram overlays your profile row at the top and the reply bar at the bottom, and on Reels a caption and action buttons sit over the lower-right. The reliable working area is roughly 1080 × 1420, centred vertically — leave about 250 pixels clear at the top and another 250 at the bottom. Text placed outside that band will be covered by interface elements on some devices.

Facebook

X (Twitter)

X preserves transparency in PNG uploads but converts most JPEGs. Its timeline crop means a portrait image will be centre-cropped to a wide strip in the feed — the full image only appears when someone taps it. If the whole image matters, either use 16:9 or accept that most people will only see the middle.

LinkedIn

YouTube

The banner safe area is the whole game

YouTube's channel banner is displayed at wildly different crops: a television shows the full 2560 × 1440, a desktop browser shows roughly 2560 × 423, and a phone shows only about 1546 × 423 from the centre. That central 1546 × 423 region is the only part guaranteed to appear everywhere. Put your channel name and logo there. Everything outside it is bleed that exists purely to fill large screens.

Thumbnails deserve a different kind of attention. They are displayed as small as 168 × 94 in a sidebar, so the design constraint is not resolution — it is legibility at postage-stamp size. Three or four large words maximum, high contrast against the background, and one clear focal point. Design it at 1280 × 720, then shrink it to 20% on screen and check that it still reads.

Pinterest and TikTok

Pinterest is the one platform where taller genuinely performs better, because its feed is a vertical masonry layout and a tall pin simply occupies more of the screen. 2:3 is the recommended ratio; beyond about 1:2.1 Pinterest truncates the pin in feed with a "see more" affordance.

Link previews (Open Graph)

When someone pastes your URL into any messaging app or social platform, the preview card is generated from Open Graph meta tags in your page's <head>, not from anything you upload. One image serves nearly every platform:

Two rules that are easy to miss. The URL must be absolute — a relative path like /preview.png is silently ignored by most scrapers. And the image must be publicly reachable without a login, because the scraper fetches it as an anonymous visitor. A preview that works for you and nobody else is almost always an authentication problem.

Which format to export

Always export in the sRGB colour space. If you export in Adobe RGB or Display P3, platforms that strip the colour profile will render your carefully chosen colours as noticeably duller versions of themselves. This is the usual explanation for "my reds looked vivid in Lightroom and flat on Instagram".

A practical export workflow

1. Work large, export small. Keep your master at full camera or design resolution. Export platform-sized copies from it. Never resize your master down and then need it back.
2. Design at 4:5. A 1080 × 1350 canvas with the important content inside the central square gives you a portrait post, a square crop and a landscape crop from one file.
3. Mark the safe zones. For any banner or story, put the safe area on its own guide layer so you never drift outside it.
4. Export once per ratio, not once per platform. 1200 × 630 serves Facebook, LinkedIn, X cards and most chat apps. You need far fewer files than the tables above suggest.
5. Check the file size cap before uploading — exceeding it triggers the platform's most aggressive downsampling, which is where visible quality loss comes from.
6. Verify at display size. Shrink your thumbnail to 15% and your story to phone size. Most legibility problems are invisible at 100% zoom.

Master reference table

Every dimension on this page, sorted by ratio so you can see how few distinct sizes there really are.

Keeping this current

Platforms adjust these numbers without announcement — Instagram's move from square to 4:5 grid thumbnails invalidated a decade of design templates overnight. Rather than memorising the table, remember the three principles: ratio controls cropping, upload above display size but not beyond the platform's stored maximum, and design inside the safe zone. Those have not changed in ten years and are unlikely to change in the next ten.

When a platform does change, you can usually derive the new size yourself in two minutes: post a test image with a numbered grid on it, view it on desktop and mobile, and note which numbers survive. That is how most of the safe-zone figures on this page were originally worked out.

Frequently Asked Questions