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The right image sizes for every social platform (2026 cheat sheet)
By FileNimbus Editorial · Reviewed & edited by Franklin Brown ·June 30, 2026
Every platform silently reshapes images that arrive at the wrong size — center-cropping profile photos, stretching banners, compressing oversized uploads into mush. Uploading the exact dimensions a platform expects is the cheapest possible upgrade to how professional your content looks. Here’s the current cheat sheet.
The numbers
| Platform | Placement | Size (px) | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feed post (portrait) | 1080 × 1350 | 4:5 | |
| Story / Reel | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 | |
| Profile photo | 320 × 320 | 1:1 | |
| X (Twitter) | In-feed image | 1600 × 900 | 16:9 |
| X (Twitter) | Header | 1500 × 500 | 3:1 |
| Shared image | 1200 × 630 | 1.91:1 | |
| Cover photo | 820 × 312 | — | |
| Shared image | 1200 × 627 | 1.91:1 | |
| Personal banner | 1584 × 396 | 4:1 | |
| YouTube | Thumbnail | 1280 × 720 | 16:9 |
| YouTube | Channel banner | 2560 × 1440 | 16:9 |
| TikTok | Video / photo | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 |
| Open Graph (link previews) | og:image | 1200 × 630 | 1.91:1 |
Platforms tweak these occasionally, but the ratios are stable — get the ratio right and a platform update usually costs you nothing.
Why wrong sizes look bad (it’s not just cropping)
Three separate things go wrong when dimensions don’t match:
Cropping. Platforms crop from the center. Put your subject (or text) near an edge and a 4:5 crop of your 1:1 image amputates it. Design inside the target ratio from the start.
Recompression. Every platform re-encodes uploads. Feed it a 8000px, 12 MB photo and it gets downscaled and recompressed aggressively — often looking worse than if you had uploaded a clean 1080px version yourself. Uploading at (or slightly above) the display size gives the platform less destructive work to do.
Upscaling. Upload below the target — a 400px image into a 1280px thumbnail slot — and the platform stretches it. Nothing rescues an upscaled image; it reads as low-effort instantly.
A workflow that takes 30 seconds
- Crop to the target ratio first, so you control what survives — not the platform’s center-crop. (Our image cropper has the common ratios as presets.)
- Resize to the exact pixels from the table — the resizer includes these presets too.
- Compress before upload — around quality 80 is invisible and keeps you comfortably under every platform’s size limits. (Compressor here.)
All three steps run in your browser, so the workflow is: drop, click, download, upload.
One image, many platforms?
Design at 1080 × 1350 (Instagram portrait). It’s the largest common feed format, it crops cleanly to 1:1, and downsizing to 1600 × 900 crops acceptably if you kept the subject centered in the middle 60%. Then export the 9:16 story variant separately — vertical formats never convert well from horizontal sources, in either direction.
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Our articles are drafted with AI assistance and reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by a human editor before publishing.