Image sizes for social media and how to resize for them

Get the aspect ratio right first and the pixel dimensions second. Platforms enforce the shape: upload a photo that is the wrong shape and it is cropped, letterboxed or squeezed into a preview without asking you. Pixel dimensions only decide how much detail survives the platform's own re-compression.

The quickest route here: open Crop image, pick the ratio you need (1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 9:16), move the frame over the part that matters and crop. Then open Resize image, choose the social media preset or type the exact width, and download. Crop before you resize — doing it the other way round throws away pixels you then wish you had.

Sizes that are worth targeting

Placement	Ratio	Pixel size to upload
Instagram square post	1:1	1080 × 1080
Instagram portrait post	4:5	1080 × 1350
Instagram landscape post	1.91:1	1080 × 566
Stories, Reels, TikTok	9:16	1080 × 1920
Link preview (Facebook, LinkedIn)	≈1.91:1	1200 × 630
X in-feed photo	16:9	1600 × 900
YouTube thumbnail	16:9	1280 × 720
LinkedIn profile banner	4:1	1584 × 396
Pinterest pin	2:3	1000 × 1500
Profile picture (any network)	1:1	800 × 800 or larger

The ratios in the middle column have been stable for years and are the part worth memorising. The pixel figures are the sizes the platforms currently work well with; every network reserves the right to change its layout, so check the help pages of the one you care about before a campaign. Two figures are documented requirements rather than conventions: a YouTube custom thumbnail must currently be at least 640 px wide and under 2 MB, and 4:5 is the tallest shape Instagram accepts in the feed — anything taller is cropped.

Uploading much larger than the figures above gains nothing. Every platform downscales and re-encodes what you send, so a 6000 px original is reduced to the same 1080 px as a 1080 px file, just after a slower upload.

Keep the important part away from the edges

Faces, logos and text get clipped in three different ways:

• Profile pictures are masked into circles. A square image loses its corners. Leave a margin of roughly 10% on each side.
• Feeds show a cropped preview. A 4:5 portrait post can appear as a square thumbnail on a profile grid, so the top and bottom of the frame are not guaranteed to be visible.
• Vertical video interfaces cover the frame. In Stories, Reels and TikTok the app draws the account name, caption and buttons over your image. The exact heights change with app updates; keeping text and faces out of the top and bottom sixth of a 9:16 frame survives those changes.

A practical rule that covers all three: keep anything that must be read inside the central 80% of the image.

What resizing actually does to the file

• Downscaling discards pixels. Done well — averaging groups of pixels rather than picking one of them — the result stays sharp. Resize image halves the image progressively and then smooths, which avoids the jagged edges of a single-step resize.
• Upscaling invents pixels. A 500 px logo enlarged to 1080 px is not sharper, only bigger and softer. Export a new one from the source file instead.
• Cropping is lossless for what you keep. The kept region is copied at full resolution; only the re-encode at save time touches quality.
• Saving drops EXIF. The date, camera model and GPS coordinates do not survive the re-encode. Most large networks also strip that data themselves, but not every site does — see how to remove location from photos if you want to be sure.
• Transparency does not survive a JPEG. A logo on a transparent background saved as JPG gets a solid fill. Keep PNG for that, and expect the platform to flatten it anyway when it converts your upload.

Upload quality: good, not maximum

Platforms re-compress every upload. That second pass works on whatever you gave it, so the sensible strategy is to hand over a clean file at the right size rather than a huge one:

• Save at quality 80–90. Below about 60 you will see blocks in skies and halos around text, and the platform's own pass makes them worse.
• Keep text large. Small captions burned into an image are the first thing to smear after re-compression.
• If an upload is refused for size, run it through Compress image rather than re-exporting at a lower quality several times.

What the built-in apps can do

• Windows Photos crops with aspect-ratio presets (Square, 16:9, 4:3 and others) in the Crop tool, and resizes to exact pixel dimensions through the "Resize image" option in the "See more" menu.
• macOS Preview crops with a rectangular selection followed by Tools → Crop, and resizes with Tools → Adjust Size. It has no ratio presets, so watch the pixel readout while you drag. File → Export gives you a quality slider.
• iPhone Photos has ratio presets in Edit → Crop, including Square, 4:3, 16:9 and 9:16. It cannot resize to pixel dimensions at all.
• Android Google Photos has Edit → Crop with Free, Original, Square and 16:9. Pixel resizing depends on the manufacturer's gallery app, so it is not something to rely on.

Failure cases worth knowing

Your iPhone photo is a HEIC file. Some upload forms and most browser-based editors cannot read it, because browsers do not decode HEIC. Set Settings → Camera → Formats to "Most Compatible" to shoot JPEG, or share the photo through an app that converts it.

The preview picks the wrong crop. Link previews are generated from the page's Open Graph image, not from the pictures in the article. If a shared link looks wrong, the fix is a 1200 × 630 image on the page, not a new upload.

A screenshot looks soft after upload. Screenshots are full of sharp text, which JPEG handles badly. Upload a PNG when you can, and use Image converter to produce it.

The same file is rejected on one network and accepted on another. Formats differ: WebP is fine in most browsers but is not accepted everywhere as an upload. Convert to JPG or PNG when a form objects.

Questions people ask

Does a bigger upload mean better quality? Only up to the platform's own maximum. Beyond that the file is downscaled on arrival and you have gained nothing.

Can I resize several images at once? Yes — drop the whole batch into Resize image and download them together.

Why is my profile picture cut off? It is being masked into a circle. Re-crop at 1:1 with the subject centred and some room around it.

Should I use JPG or PNG? JPG for photographs, PNG for flat graphics, screenshots and anything with text. JPG vs PNG vs WebP covers the trade-offs.

Does resizing lose quality? Making an image smaller keeps it sharp. Making it larger does not add detail.

Next steps

• Crop to an exact ratio: Crop image
• Make the file smaller before uploading: Compress image, and the guide How to reduce image file size
• Strip location data first: Remove image metadata