Complete Guide to Image Sizes for Social Media (2026)
18 August 2026 · 8 min read
Social platforms crop, scale and recompress everything you upload. Give them the right dimensions and they leave your image alone; give them the wrong ones and they'll cut off someone's head or turn your text into a smudge.
Here are the sizes that matter in 2026, followed by the export settings that actually determine whether your image survives the platform's compression.
The two numbers that cover most situations
If you remember nothing else, remember these:
- 1080 × 1350 (4:5 portrait) — feed posts on Instagram and Facebook
- 1080 × 1920 (9:16 vertical) — Stories, Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts
This is a genuine change from a few years ago, when square (1:1) was the default advice. Portrait now takes up substantially more of a phone screen as someone scrolls, and the platforms have adjusted their feeds accordingly. If you're still exporting everything as squares, switching to 4:5 is the single easiest improvement you can make.
For Stories and Reels, keep important content away from the top and bottom ~250 pixels — that space is covered by the interface and, on Reels, by the caption and buttons.
The cover photo is the one that catches people out: mobile crops the sides, desktop crops the top and bottom. Keep anything essential in the middle.
The personal banner is unusually wide and your profile photo sits over the lower-left corner of it. Anything you place there will be hidden.
X (Twitter)
YouTube
The channel banner is displayed at wildly different crops on TV, desktop and mobile. Only the central 1546 × 423 region is guaranteed visible everywhere — keep your logo and text inside it.
Why your uploads look worse than the file you exported
Every platform recompresses what you upload, to save its own bandwidth. You can't prevent that, but you can give it less to damage:
- Export at the exact target dimensions, or exactly 2×. If the platform has to scale your image, it does so with fast, low-quality resampling. Matching the target means it doesn't have to.
- Use sRGB colour. Images exported in wider colour spaces like Adobe RGB or Display P3 often come out looking washed out or oddly saturated after upload, because the platform converts them without your profile.
- Export at high quality, not maximum. Around 85–90% is ideal. The platform will recompress anyway, so a 12MB export gains you nothing — but starting from an already heavily compressed file means the artefacts compound.
- Avoid thin text and fine detail. These are exactly what lossy compression destroys first. Bigger, bolder text survives.
A note on cropping
When your image doesn't match the target ratio, something has to go. There are two ways to handle that: crop (fill the frame, lose the edges) or fit (keep everything, add bars). For social media, cropping almost always looks better — letterboxed images read as lazy.
The important thing is to crop deliberately rather than letting the platform do it. Platform auto-crops are centre-based and don't know where the subject is, which is how you end up with a post where everyone's forehead is cut off.
Ready-made presets
Each of these resizes and centre-crops your image to the exact platform dimensions, in your browser:
Platform specifications change periodically. These dimensions were checked in August 2026.