Social media image sizes

Which size are you actually looking for

Start from the surface the image is going to rather than the platform it belongs to. Every network here uses different shapes for a feed post, a header, a full-screen frame and an avatar, and it is the shape that decides what gets cut.

• Instagram post: 1080x1080px. Three feed shapes off one canvas, and the one most people mean by an Instagram size.
• YouTube thumbnail: 1280x720px. The only size here with a hard file ceiling, and the one judged smallest.
• YouTube banner: 2560x1440px. Uploaded for a television and cropped to a strip for everybody else.
• Facebook cover photo: 820x312px. Two different crops of one file, one for the desktop page and one for the app.
• LinkedIn banner: 1584x396px. A long shallow strip with your own photograph overlapping its left end.
• Instagram story: 1080x1920px. The full screen, with the top and the bottom spoken for by the app.
• Instagram reel: 1080x1920px. One frame and two cover crops: a square on your grid, a taller one in the feed.
• X (Twitter) header: 1500x500px. A shallow band behind the avatar, cropped harder on a phone than on a laptop.
• Instagram profile picture: 320x320px. Stored square, drawn as a circle, and seen at a fraction of its size.
• LinkedIn post image: 1200x627px. Three feed shapes, all of them scaled to one narrow column.
• TikTok video: 1080x1920px. Full screen, with the interface drawn on top of your frame.
• Instagram carousel: 1080x1350px. The one format where the first slide decides the shape of the whole set.

The six rules underneath every number on these pages

A dozen size charts turn out to be half a dozen ideas repeated with different numbers. Learning them is quicker than memorising tables, and they tell you what to do on a surface that has no page here yet.

• The ratio decides what gets cut, not the pixel count. Two files of the same width and different heights lose completely different parts of the picture.
• Fill and crop is the default everywhere. Hand a platform a shape it did not want and it enlarges the file until it covers the slot, then trims the overflow off both edges of the longer axis.
• Upload at the width the surface keeps. Anything larger is discarded in a downscale you cannot tune, and anything smaller costs you an upscale followed by a compression pass.
• A header has a safe middle and a disposable outside, because every screen width keeps a different band out of it.
• Every avatar on every network here is stored square and drawn as a circle, so nobody ever sees the corners you uploaded.
• Full-screen surfaces draw their own controls over your image, which makes the usable area smaller than the frame in every single case.

How to check an image without uploading it anywhere

Every page in this family carries the same check, and all of it runs in the browser: the file is opened locally, measured on a canvas and forgotten when the tab closes. None of it reaches a server of ours, which is why there is no account and no limit.

1. 1Open the page for the surface you are posting to, and pick the row you actually mean.
2. 2Choose the file. The measurement is immediate, because there is no upload to wait for.
3. 3Read the verdict: an exact match, the same shape at a different scale, or a crop naming the axis and the share of it that goes.
4. 4Fix it in the matching resizer if you need to, which exports the same numbers this table lists.

What a size chart will not tell you

Sizes are the part of this job with a right answer, which is exactly why they soak up more attention than they deserve. It is worth being clear about where a chart stops being the useful thing.

• A correctly sized image can still be the wrong image. Nothing here recomposes a photograph whose subject is sitting at the edge of the frame.
• Platforms move these numbers quietly and rarely announce it, so treat any chart, this one included, as the current best answer rather than a law.
• Text inside an image is invisible to search and to a screen reader on every network here, so anything that matters belongs in the caption as well.
• Compression is the other half of quality and it is applied after your resize. Flat colour and large type survive it, and fine texture does not.
• The right size is a floor rather than a ceiling. Past it, what decides the post is the picture, the first line and the timing.