Social MediaImage Size Guide

Most social images come down to three aspect ratios. If you design at these sizes you'll rarely need anything else.

• 9:16 tall (1080 × 1920): stories, Reels, TikTok, Shorts and Pinterest video.
• 4:5 portrait (1080 × 1350): feed posts on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. It takes up more of the screen than a square.
• 16:9 wide (1920 × 1080, or 1280 × 720 for thumbnails): YouTube videos and thumbnails, and images on X.

Instagram displays feed images at up to 1080 pixels wide, and most other apps scale to a similar width on phones. Uploading bigger rarely looks sharper, because the app shrinks it and recompresses it anyway. Uploading smaller can look soft.

Profile photos are the exception. They're shown small, but upload them at the size in the table or larger so they stay crisp on high-resolution screens.

Banners and full-screen formats get covered or cropped on some devices. A YouTube banner is 2560 × 1440, but only the centre 1546 × 423 is shown everywhere, so keep your name and text in there. On stories, Reels and TikTok, the top and bottom are covered by buttons and captions, so keep text out of roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels.

Profile photos are cropped to a circle on almost every platform. Keep your face in the middle and leave space around it.

Sizes here are the ones the platforms recommend or have used consistently at the time of writing. Apps do change their layouts, like Instagram moving its profile grid to taller 3:4 tiles, so when a new format appears, check the app's help pages. When in doubt, keep the important part of the picture in the middle so any crop still works.

Your link-in-bio page uses your profile photo too, so one sharp square photo goes a long way.

File size matters as well as pixel size. Most apps cap image uploads somewhere between a few and a few dozen megabytes, and YouTube thumbnails must be under 2 MB. A JPEG at high quality keeps a 1080-pixel image well under any of those caps.