Social Media Image Sizes in 2026: Dimensions, Aspect Ratios and Cropping

About the numbers: the sizes below are common sizes as of 2026. Social platforms change their layouts and recommendations without much notice, so treat them as starting points and check the platform’s own help center before an important campaign.

Every social platform resizes the images you upload, so you rarely need an exact pixel count. What platforms cannot fix is the shape. When an image’s aspect ratio does not match the space it is shown in, the platform crops it automatically, usually around the center, or adds empty bars. Getting the aspect ratio right, and knowing which areas will be covered or cropped, matters more than the exact number of pixels.

Aspect ratio first, pixel size second

An aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height: 1:1 is a square, 4:5 is a portrait rectangle slightly taller than it is wide, 16:9 is the widescreen shape of most videos. Once the ratio is right, the pixel size mainly determines sharpness. Uploading an image much larger than the platform displays rarely helps, because it will be scaled down and re-compressed anyway, while uploading one that is too small leads to a soft, enlarged picture.

Common sizes at a glance

Two recent changes are worth knowing about. Instagram’s profile grid switched from square to taller 3:4 previews in 2025, so square and 4:5 posts are trimmed at the sides in the grid view, although not in the feed; check the grid preview before publishing if your grid layout matters to you. And X shows single images in the timeline at a wider range of shapes than it used to, but 16:9 remains the shape that displays predictably everywhere.

Safe zones: what gets covered or cropped

A correctly sized image can still lose important details, because platforms lay buttons, names and captions over it or show it in a different shape in different places.

• Profile pictures are displayed as circles. The corners of the square, about a fifth of its area, are never visible, so keep faces and logos well inside the center.
• Stories and Reels have the account name and progress bar at the top and captions, reply boxes and buttons at the bottom. A widely used rule is to keep text and logos out of the top and bottom 14% of a 1080 × 1920 frame, roughly 250 pixels each.
• Headers and cover images are cropped differently on desktop and mobile, and the profile photo overlaps the bottom-left corner on X and LinkedIn. Keep important content in the middle.
• YouTube channel banners are shown in full on TVs but only as a narrow horizontal band on phones and computers. YouTube’s upload screen shows the safe area; keep text and logos inside it.
• Link previews are shown at 1.91:1 in most feeds but can be cropped to a square in some compact layouts, so keep any text on the image near the center.

Preparing an image in three steps

1. Crop to the ratio. Open Crop Image and choose the matching preset, such as 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9, 2:3, 1.91:1 or 3:1. The largest possible selection appears; move it so the subject sits where you want it. The Selection line shows the size in pixels, so you can tell whether the crop is at least as large as the target size.
2. Resize to the target width. In Resize Image, keep the aspect ratio locked and type the width from the table, for example 1080. The height follows automatically.
3. Compress sensibly. Platforms re-compress what you upload, and a file that is already heavily compressed degrades further. Use Compress Image with JPEG at quality 85–90 for photos, and keep graphics that contain text as PNG. JPEG and PNG are accepted by every major platform.

A worked example: to turn a 4032 × 3024 landscape phone photo into a 4:5 Instagram portrait post, choose 4:5 in the crop tool. The largest 4:5 selection in that photo is 2419 × 3024 pixels, so there is plenty of resolution. Place it over your subject, crop, then resize the result to a width of 1080; the height becomes 1350, exactly the portrait size in the table.

Link preview images for your own website

When someone shares a link to your site, most networks and messaging apps show the image named in the page’s Open Graph tags. A 1.91:1 image of 1200 × 630 pixels is the common choice. Declaring its size helps some platforms display it without first downloading it:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/images/share-1200x630.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Short description of the image">

Use JPG or PNG for these images. Social networks generally do not accept SVG for previews, and support for WebP differs between the apps that read the tags.

Text, faces and accessibility

• Keep text large and short. Most social images are seen on phones at a few centimeters wide. A handful of bold words works better than a paragraph.
• Check at phone size. Zoom out until the image is roughly as small as it will appear in a feed, and make sure the message still reads.
• Add alt text. Instagram, Facebook, X and LinkedIn all let you add a text description to images. It helps people who use screen readers and costs a few seconds.
• Do not rely on the automatic crop. Platforms often choose the center; crop the image yourself so you decide what is visible.

Quick checklist

1. Look up the placement and its aspect ratio, and check the platform’s help page for recent changes.
2. Crop to that ratio, keeping faces and text inside the safe zones.
3. Resize to the recommended width.
4. Save as JPEG at 85–90 for photos, PNG for text-heavy graphics.
5. Preview at phone size and add alt text when you post.

Tools mentioned in this guide

More guides

• JPG vs PNG vs WebP: How to Choose the Right Image Format – How each format stores pixels, where each one wins, what transparency and browser support mean in practice, and a five-question checklist for picking the right format.
• How to Compress Images for Your Website Without Visible Quality Loss – A practical workflow: size images to how they are displayed, pick a format, find the lowest quality that still looks right, and serve the result with the right HTML attributes.