Social Media Image Sizes — Free, Fast & Private
Every social media platform has its own set of image dimensions, and they change more often than most people realise. Upload the wrong size and your photo gets cropped awkwardly, compressed aggressively, or displayed with black bars. This reference covers every major platform's current specifications as of 2026.
The most common mistake is using the same image across all platforms. An Instagram post at 1080x1080 looks fine on Instagram, but when you share the same file on LinkedIn (which prefers 1200x627), it gets cropped to a thin strip. Similarly, a YouTube thumbnail must be 16:9 — anywhere from the classic 1280x720 baseline up to the 3840x2160 that Google now recommends, a shift unpacked on the dedicated YouTube thumbnail size page. Captioned images suffer the most from a wrong-shaped upload: a platform crop that shaves the bottom of the frame takes the punchline with it, which is why the meme generator advises cropping to the destination ratio before adding the text, not after.
Portrait posts outperform square on Instagram because they take up more screen space in the feed — and the portrait target has moved: the profile grid now uses 3:4 tiles, making 1080x1440 the grid-native shape, while the classic 4:5 (1080x1350) still displays fine. The Instagram post size page covers when each ratio wins. For stories and reels across all platforms, 1080x1920 (9:16) is the standard, but leave a 15% safe zone at the top and bottom for platform UI overlays — profile icons, captions, and interaction buttons will cover those areas.
The trickiest single slots have their own deep-dive pages with verified specs and crop workflows: the Facebook cover photo (officially 851x315, displayed differently on desktop and mobile) and the LinkedIn banner (1584x396 for profiles, a different 1128x191 spec for company pages). And image limits do not stop at the feed platforms — chat communities enforce their own: Discord custom emoji must stay under 256KB, while Twitch emotes ship as transparent PNGs at 28, 56, and 112 pixels.
File size matters as much as dimensions. Facebook recommends under 100KB for profile photos and under 1MB for feed images. Instagram compresses anything over 1MB quite aggressively. LinkedIn is more lenient but still re-encodes images above 2MB. Using MiniPx to compress your image to the right dimensions and file size before uploading gives you control over how your content looks, rather than leaving it to platform algorithms.
For the best results: crop to the ratio listed above, cap the width at the pixel size listed with it, compress the result to under 500KB using Smart preset, and export as JPEG for photos or PNG for graphics with text. This approach works across every platform and avoids the quality degradation that comes from letting platforms handle the resizing themselves. Consistency of colour matters as much as dimensions for a branded feed — if the exact brand shade lives inside a logo or an earlier post rather than in a style guide, pick the colour from the image and reuse the same HEX across every graphic. And when the source is too small for a spec rather than too large — a thumbnail destined for a 4K TV home screen, say — upscale the image to 4K with AI first, then resize down to the exact target.
Aspect ratio: the constraint that survives every resize
Aspect ratio is width divided by height, and it is the one property compression and resizing never change. Scale a 1920×1080 image to 960×540 and it is 16:9 both times. That is why a platform complaining about shape cannot be satisfied by making the file smaller — the only fix is a crop.
The ratios worth memorising: 1:1 square for marketplace and profile images, 4:5 for portrait feed posts, 9:16 for full-screen vertical video and stories, 16:9 for landscape video and most presentation slides, and 3:2 for what most cameras natively produce — which is why a straight-from-camera photo never quite fits a square frame without losing something at the edges. One more wrinkle on the 1:1 profile square: most platforms mask it to a circle on display, so circle-crop the photo first to see what actually survives the round frame.
Ratios are enforced in places people do not expect. GATE requires 0.66 to 0.89 for an application photograph and rejects a square one. Substack crops any full-width image taller than 1:1 automatically. Decide the crop yourself, or the platform decides it for you — usually by removing the bottom of your subject.
Two Facebook cases have their own pages because the numbers differ by placement: compressing for Facebook when the file is too heavy, and resizing for Facebook when the shape is wrong for a cover or a post.