Image Sizes for Social Media: the 2026 Cheat Sheet

You have a good photo. You post it, and the platform cuts the top of someone's head off, or pads it with grey bars, or softens it into something that looks worse than what you started with.

None of that is bad luck. Each platform renders images at a fixed shape, and anything that arrives in a different shape gets forced into it. Give it the right rectangle and the problem disappears.

Here are the sizes, then the part most cheat sheets skip: what to do when your photo is the wrong shape to begin with.

The sizes

These are the dimensions our image resizer offers as one-tap presets, so the list and the tool cannot drift apart.

Instagram

• Post (square) — 1080 × 1080
• Portrait — 1080 × 1350. The tallest shape the feed will show without cropping, so it takes up the most screen.
• Story and Reels — 1080 × 1920

LinkedIn, Facebook and X

• LinkedIn post — 1200 × 627
• Facebook post — 1200 × 630
• X post — 1600 × 900

YouTube

• Thumbnail — 1280 × 720

Two things worth noticing. LinkedIn and Facebook differ by three pixels, which is close enough that one image serves both. And every number here is wider than it is tall except Instagram's, which is why a feed photo built for Instagram looks wrong everywhere else.

Why the wrong shape ruins the picture

A platform never leaves empty space. If your image is taller than the slot, it crops the top and bottom. If it is wider, it crops the sides. The crop is automatic and it is centred, which is the problem: it has no idea that your subject is standing slightly left of centre.

That is how a group photo loses the person on the end, and how a product shot ends up showing the table instead of the product.

The fix is to decide the crop yourself, before you upload, rather than letting an algorithm guess.

Resize or crop? They are not the same thing

This is the distinction that makes the sizes above usable, and it trips up most people.

• Resizing changes how many pixels the image has, keeping its shape. A 4000 × 3000 photo resized is still 4:3 — just smaller. Nothing is lost from the edges.
• Cropping changes the shape by cutting pixels away. A 4:3 photo cropped to a square loses the sides, and you choose which sides.

So if your photo is already the right shape, resizing is all you need. If it is the wrong shape — and a phone photo is 4:3 or 3:2, never square — resizing alone cannot get you there.

Our image resizer fits your photo inside the target size rather than stretching it to fill, so it comes back correctly proportioned instead of squashed. That is the right behaviour, and it also means a portrait asked for a square comes back smaller, not square.

To actually change the shape, use the image cropper and pick the ratio you want. You choose what stays in frame, which is the whole point.

The order that works

Crop first, then resize. Decide the shape while you still have all the pixels, then bring the dimensions down to the target.

Doing it the other way round means you resize to 1080 wide, then crop away a third of it, and finish with an image smaller and softer than it needed to be.

Export settings that matter

• Use JPG for photographs. It handles gradients and skin tones efficiently.
• Use PNG for screenshots, logos and anything with text or flat colour. JPG puts visible fuzz around hard edges.
• Do not upscale. Enlarging a small image does not add detail; it just makes the existing detail bigger and softer. If your source is 600 pixels wide, a 1600-pixel export will look worse than the original.
• Export once. Every JPG save discards a little more. Edit from the original rather than re-saving a copy of a copy.

If a platform or form is rejecting your file for being too large rather than the wrong shape, that is a different fix — getting a photo under a size limit is its own job, and quality survives it better than most people expect.

A note on these numbers

Platforms change their layouts, and when they do, these dimensions move. The sizes above are checked periodically against each platform's own published guidance rather than copied from other cheat sheets, which is how stale numbers spread. If one looks wrong, trust the platform.

The underlying shapes change far more slowly than the pixel counts. Square, tall portrait, full-screen vertical, and wide landscape have been the four social shapes for years. Get the shape right and a slightly outdated pixel count costs you almost nothing.

Get the shape right first, the pixel count second, and the format third. That order fixes almost every social image problem before it happens.