Social Media Image Sizes: The Cheat Sheet for Every Post Type

Nothing undoes good creative faster than the wrong crop. A headline sliced in half, a logo cut off at the edge, a portrait squeezed into a letterbox: it all reads as careless, and it happens because every platform crops to its own rules.

This is a practical reference. If you only remember one number, make it **1080 × 1350 (4:5 portrait)** — it displays in full on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, and only gets cropped slightly on X and Bluesky. Square 1080 × 1080 is the zero-risk fallback when you cannot afford any crop. Below you will find the sizes that actually matter, drawn to scale so you can see at a glance how each format behaves.

The three rules that save the most work

Design portrait first. Most social traffic is mobile, and portrait formats (4:5 and 9:16) simply occupy more of the screen than landscape. Build the tall version, then crop down to square and landscape.

Keep a safe zone. Leave roughly 10% clear on every edge, and more at the top and bottom of stories and reels where interface elements sit. Anything critical, logos, prices, calls to action, belongs in the middle.

Export at 2x, not 4x. Platforms recompress everything. Uploading a 4000px file gains nothing but upload time; the sizes below are already the target dimensions.

Image sizes by platform

Every tile below is drawn at its true aspect ratio, so the shape you see is the shape you get.

Link previews are a separate job

When someone shares a link to your site rather than uploading an image, the platform pulls your Open Graph image instead. That is a 1200 × 630px card defined in your page metadata, and it is the one image most sites forget. We covered it in full in The Essential Guide to OG Images.

File formats and weight

Use JPEG for photography and PNG for anything with flat colour, sharp type or transparency. WebP is widely supported for link previews but still inconsistent for direct uploads, so keep a JPEG fallback. Aim to stay under 1MB per image; heavier files get compressed more aggressively, which is where banding and soft text come from.

A quick pre-flight check

Before anything goes out: is the key message inside the safe zone, does the text survive at thumbnail size, does the crop still work as a square, and does the first frame of your video stand up as a still? Four questions, thirty seconds, far fewer reposts.