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Social Media Image Sizes in 2026 (and How to Not Crop Out the Important Part)
The full 2026 size chart for Instagram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest — plus why platform auto-cropping ruins photos and the focal-point fix that stops it.
You resize a photo to “Instagram size,” post it, and the platform still crops your subject’s head off in the feed thumbnail. The size was right. The crop wasn’t — because a single rectangle doesn’t survive being resized into six different aspect ratios without you telling the platform what actually matters in the frame. Here’s the current chart, why the crop keeps going wrong, and the one setting that fixes it for good.
Sharing a link rather than posting an image? Link previews are a different system — see the Open Graph image size guide.
The 2026 size chart
| Platform | Format | Size | Aspect ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feed post (portrait, current default) | 1080 × 1350 | 4:5 | |
| Feed post (square) | 1080 × 1080 | 1:1 | |
| Story / Reel | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 | |
| X (Twitter) | In-feed post image | 1600 × 900 | 16:9 |
| X (Twitter) | Header/banner | 1500 × 500 | 3:1 |
| Feed post | 1200 × 630 | 1.91:1 | |
| Cover photo (desktop) | 820 × 312 | ~2.63:1 | |
| Feed post | 1200 × 627 | ~1.91:1 | |
| Cover photo | 1584 × 396 | 4:1 | |
| Profile photo | 400 × 400 | 1:1 | |
| YouTube | Video thumbnail | 1280 × 720 | 16:9 |
| YouTube | Channel banner | 2560 × 1440 (safe area 1546 × 423) | 16:9 |
| TikTok | Video / cover | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 |
| Pin | 1000 × 1500 | 2:3 |
A few things worth calling out before you screenshot the table and forget the rest of the post:
- Instagram’s feed default moved to portrait (4:5, 1080×1350). Square used to be the safe universal size; as of Instagram’s grid update, portrait gets more vertical real estate in-feed and has become the recommended default for new posts. Square (1080×1080) still works and won’t get rejected — it just renders smaller than a portrait post next to it.
- YouTube’s banner has three visible zones, not one. The full 2560×1440 canvas only shows completely on a TV app. Desktop shows roughly 2560×423 (a wide strip), and mobile shows only the center 1546×423. Put your channel name and any text inside that 1546×423 safe area, or it gets cut on phones — which is most of your audience.
- Facebook’s cover photo crops differently by device too. Desktop shows the full 820×312; mobile shows a taller, narrower center crop. Keep anything critical inside the middle of the frame, not the far left/right edges.
- X and Facebook both use ~1.91:1 (or close to it) for in-feed link/post images — if that number looks familiar, it’s the same ratio as the Open Graph standard covered in the OG image size guide. That’s a coincidence of history, not a rule that link previews and feed photos are interchangeable — they’re rendered by different systems and often different code paths on the same platform.
Why the crop goes wrong (it’s not you)
Every platform above wants a different aspect ratio. That’s the whole problem, and it’s math, not a settings mistake: an aspect ratio is a ratio, and turning one ratio into another means removing pixels from one axis. There’s no way around this — you’re either cropping content out, adding padding (which most platforms discourage or actively shrink to fit), or accepting a stretched image (which looks obviously wrong and platforms generally refuse to do anyway).
The failure mode is specific: most platforms crop from the center of the image, blind to what’s actually in it. A photo where your subject is slightly left-of-center works fine as a square. Resize the same source photo for a 9:16 Story and a naive center-crop keeps the vertical middle and throws away the left and right thirds — which might be exactly where your subject stood. Nobody manually cropped anything wrong. The platform’s default crop logic just doesn’t know what matters in your photo; it only knows the rectangle’s geometric center.
This compounds when you’re producing five sizes from one source image by hand: each export is a separate manual crop, each one is a chance to lose the framing, and by the fifth platform you’re eyeballing it differently than you did for the first.
The fix: pick the focal point once
The actual solution isn’t a better manual crop — it’s telling the tool once where the subject is, and letting every output size crop around that point instead of the image’s geometric center. That’s what Social Media Image Resizer does: upload once, set a focal point on the face or subject, and it generates every platform size from that same anchor — Instagram post and Story, X post and header, Facebook post and cover, LinkedIn post and cover, YouTube thumbnail, TikTok, Pinterest — as individual downloads or one zip.
The mechanism is simple once you see it: instead of “crop this rectangle to that rectangle,” it’s “keep this coordinate visible no matter what rectangle you’re cropping to.” A square crop, a 9:16 crop, and a 3:1 banner crop all differ in how much they include around the edges, but they all keep the same point centered. That’s the entire trick, and it’s the difference between six correctly-framed exports and six variations on almost-but-not-quite.
Quality notes that matter more than people think
Export at 2x where the platform allows it. Phone screens are high-density, and a 1080px image looks visibly softer than a 2160px image scaled down by the app’s own renderer. Most platforms accept larger uploads than their “recommended” size and downscale on their end — which produces a sharper result than uploading exactly at spec. Check current upload limits before assuming bigger is always accepted (Pinterest and YouTube thumbnails, for instance, cap file size well below what a large PNG will hit).
PNG vs JPEG is still the same tradeoff it’s always been. Use PNG for flat graphics, text overlays, and logos — no compression artifacts around hard edges. Use JPEG for photos — smaller files at visually equivalent quality, and every platform re-compresses on ingest anyway, so a lossless source buys you nothing once it’s through their pipeline. If your source has fine detail you want to protect before that recompression happens, compress it intentionally rather than let the platform’s algorithm decide the quality for you.
Platform recompression is real and you can’t fully avoid it. Every major platform re-encodes what you upload — that’s why a crisp export sometimes looks slightly softer once it’s live. The move that actually helps: start from the highest-quality source you have, avoid multiple rounds of save-recompress-save before upload, and let the platform’s own recompression be the only lossy step in the chain instead of stacking your own on top of it.
The five-minute version
- Instagram feed defaults to 1080×1350 portrait now, not square — square still works, portrait renders bigger.
- Center-crop is the enemy. It doesn’t know where your subject is; it only knows the middle of the rectangle.
- Pick a focal point once and generate every size from it — that’s the whole value of the Social Media Image Resizer.
- PNG for graphics, JPEG for photos, and export larger than spec where the platform allows it.
- If you need a precise manual crop instead of an automated multi-size export, Crop Image gives you exact pixel control on a single output.
- Posting a link instead of an image? That’s the Open Graph image size guide and the OG Image Generator, not this post.