Social media image sizes & resizer

Why exact sizes still matter

Every platform resizes and re-compresses what you upload. Give it an image that is too small and it scales up, which looks soft; give it the wrong shape and it crops, often through your headline. Uploading at the recommended size and ratio means the platform only has to scale down, which is the one thing every encoder does well. The ratio matters more than the exact pixels: a 2160 × 2700 image will display just like 1080 × 1350, but a 1080 × 1080 square uploaded as a Story will be letterboxed.

A handful of shapes covers almost everything

Before you build fifteen versions of a graphic, notice how few shapes there really are. Design for these and you can crop to nearly any placement in the table above.

Safe zones: the part people forget

Size gets the image onto the screen; safe zones decide whether anyone can read it. Each platform draws its own interface on top of full-screen content, and some crop your image in other places too. Turn on the overlay in the resizer to see each one.

• Stories and Reels: Meta asks for about 14% clear at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% at the sides. On 1080 × 1920 that is 269px, 672px and 65px. Captions and buttons sit in the bottom third, so headlines belong in the upper middle.
• TikTok: similar, plus a column of buttons on the right. Treat the safe zone as approximate; it grows with long captions.
• Instagram profile grid: since early 2025 the grid shows every post as a centred 3:4 tile. A square loses 135px from each side; a Reel cover loses 240px from the top and bottom.
• YouTube channel banner: only the centre 1546 × 423 of the 2560 × 1440 canvas shows on every device. TVs show the full image, phones show only that strip.
• X header: up to 60px can be trimmed from the top and bottom, and your profile photo covers the lower left.

What changed recently

• Instagram moved its profile grid to 3:4 tiles and started accepting 3:4 (1080 × 1440) uploads in 2025.
• YouTube now recommends 3840 × 2160 thumbnails, with a 2 MB limit from mobile and 50 MB from desktop.
• LinkedIn company page covers are now 1512 × 256, and article covers 1920 × 1080 (no GIFs).
• Meta uses one safe zone for Stories and Reels: 14% top, 35% bottom, 6% sides.

Formats and file size

Export photos as JPEG at roughly 85–90% quality and graphics with text as PNG. Use the sRGB colour profile; wide-gamut images can shift colour when a platform converts them. Some placements reward small files: Facebook says cover photos load fastest as JPEGs under 100 KB. Do not go below the minimum sizes in the notes, and do not rely on small text — most people see your image at a third of its real size on a phone.

Common mistakes

• Putting the headline in the bottom third of a Story, right under the reply bar.
• Uploading a 1200 × 630 link image as an Instagram post and losing both sides.
• Exporting a logo-heavy graphic as a low-quality JPEG and getting fuzzy edges.
• Changing an Open Graph image but keeping its URL, so platforms keep showing the old one.

For link previews, pair this with the Open Graph meta generator. Presenting an app rather than a photo? Put the screenshot in a frame with the device mockup generator first. And if you want a full set of on-brand social templates rather than one-off crops, that is part of my branding work.