Whether you are preparing a quick Facebook update for your business, releasing some news with a tweet, making your product look sumptuous in an Instagram post, or making a LinkedIn status to provide knowledge to potential B2B customers, you will want your social posts to look good. Nowadays, that means including an image or video in your post. Despite the growing dominance of video content in social media marketing, with 55.1% of marketers focusing on long-form video and 38.4% on short-form video, images still play a crucial role, used by 33.3% of marketers to capture attention and convey messages effectively.

The problem is that changing image sizes for different platforms can be fiddly, particularly if you are design-challenged. Every platform seems to want different-sized images. Some prefer horizontal images, others vertical, and some even prefer square images. To help you with your posting, we present our guide to the best image sizes for social media. We cover all the leading social media networks in this guide.

Facebook is by far the world’s largest and most active social network. It may no longer be “cool” for teenagers, but it has followers ranging the full gamut of social users. It is also well set up, with a sophisticated advertising system.

When you create posts on Facebook, make sure you check how they will look at a user’s feed. You want all your images to look clear and at an appropriate specification for the feed. We’ve all probably seen somebody upload a wrongly sized photo, and the results car often not pretty. Moreover, if you're running campaigns on Facebook, you want to make sure that you're following the best practices and guidelines for Facebook Ad sizes.

Facebook has released official guidelines and for the most important images you’ll upload.

Your profile picture is your most essential image. You don’t want to be left as the default silhouette – the person seen as too lazy to upload a profile picture.

Your profile image displays as square, so you should upload a 1:1 square photograph that represents your brand. This should be a photo of yourself for a personal account, but for a business, you want something that clearly represents your business – perhaps your business logo. However, remember that Facebook doesn’t like text to take up more than 20% of an image, so you must be careful if you intend uploading a large text logo.

The profile image for business pages now sits at the top left of the page – which helps Business Pages stand out from normal personal account profiles.

The formal image sizes and specifications for Facebook profile pictures are:

A blank cover page is another sign of a Facebook amateur. Another common mistake is trying to shoehorn a photo of the wrong dimensions into acting as your cover page, which either distorts the contents of the image or requires you to crop it undesirably.

This is the large image that appears at the top of your timeline. Its size gives you creative opportunities. You should use this space to depict something that gives an idea of what you’re like as a person or brand.

The formal sizes and specifications for Facebook cover photos are:

Note

Using a PNG file can yield better results for profile pictures and cover photos that contain your logo or text.

We all share images on Facebook at some time. These appear on your timeline, and depending on Facebook’s algorithm, they also appear in a selection of your followers’ News Feeds.

Obviously, if somebody has already uploaded an image that you want to share you won’t have much control over its essential size and specifications (although you may be able to edit it in photo editing software if it is significantly different from the recommended sizes).

If you choose to upload the photo yourself, then you should first try and ensure that it meets Facebook’s image guidelines.

The formal sizes and specifications for shared Facebook images are:

Note

Aim to keep your images close to a 1.91:1 aspect ratio to ensure they display fully in the Feed without cropping.

This is like the Shared Facebook Image, except the image relates to whatever you are linking to. You can either create a post with a small image square on the left and text on the right, or a large rectangular image on top and text underneath.

The formal sizes and specifications for shared Facebook links are:

Facebook Events are great for encouraging multiple people to come together for some activity. As this is highlighted, the event image is larger than normal images.

Note

Once you've added a cover photo to your event, its size cannot be changed.

Instagram is rapidly becoming the social network of choice for those with visual tastes. It is particularly popular in niches such as fashion and beauty, home décor, and design. Instagram is probably the favorite platform currently for influencer marketing.

Instagram can be trickier to use than some of the more traditional platforms such as Facebook and X. It is only recently that most of the social media management platforms have added Instagram to their supported social networks (apart from Instagram-specialist, Later), and they all suffer from Instagram-imposed limitations.

You can upload both images and videos to Instagram, or even combine them over 24 hours into an Instagram Story.

Like most social networks, you use your profile picture on Instagram as an avatar for yourself. It is vital that you use a high-quality image that clearly identifies you, whether as an individual or a business if you have a Business Profile.

The formal sizes and specifications for Instagram profile pictures are:

When somebody goes to your profile page, they will see all your content in rows of thumbnails. They then click on these thumbnails to access larger versions of your images or videos.

Regardless of the size of your large-scale images/videos, these thumbnail images will be square.

The formal sizes and specifications for Instagram profile pictures are:

Instagram images (and videos) are the heart of Instagram. You can upload these from a variety of sources, and as such, will probably originate at a wide mix of sizes.

The formal sizes and specifications for Instagram Photos are:

Instagram Stories are now incredibly popular. These are generally vertical. You can add additional images and video clips to your Story during its 24-hour life. While most people add new pictures to their Stories, you can add existing content if you prefer.

The formal sizes and specifications for Instagram Stories Photos are:

X is former US President, Donald Trump’s social media account of choice. While its growth has been limited in recent years, being overtaken by Instagram and even TikTok for users numbers and downloads, it is still highly popular worldwide, with 600 million active users.

As with Facebook, you need to have the appropriately sized X Profile Photo and a Header Photo for your Profile page.

You don’t want to end up a X “egg” – somebody who relies on the X default image. Indeed, many users will delete followers on X without a profile picture – it’s an obvious sign on a spam account.

Your profile picture represents you – it is the first thing that people see about you, and it appears beside each tweet you make. An individual should show a picture of him or herself (or something that strongly represents him/her). A business should use its logo (or again a highly representative image).

The Picture appears at different sizes in different places, so you need to upload an image that works at a range of (square) sizes.

The formal sizes and specifications for X profile pictures are:

Your X Header photo is another place where you can show your individuality. It takes up the top section of your Profile Page. It takes up much more space than your profile image, so you should upload a much larger file. It should capture the eye of visitors to your Profile Page. It is three times as long as it is high.

The formal sizes and specifications for X header photos are:

These are the standard photos you upload for your tweets. These are also are the images in any retweets you make. You can attach photos to any of your tweets. Recent X updates mean that you don’t lose allowable characters by including an image.

X users set up their streams in different ways, depending on the devices they are using. This means that photo sizes will differ depending on an individual’s device and settings. If you want to ensure that everybody sees the most essential parts of your image, horizontally center your content.

When you share a link on X, you can set things so that X display’s a X Card (there are quite a few different varieties). Unless you’ve altered the settings, the image on a X Card is smaller than a standard in-stream photo.

The formal sizes and specifications for X In-Stream Photos are:

Although LinkedIn is not so image focused as Instagram or Pinterest, it still pays to upload quality images to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is particularly vital for B2B firms. LinkedIn is a professional network for industry leaders, so you are less likely to find images of funny cats or pranks.

LinkedIn also serves a role as a centralized resume for the world’s workers, so profile pictures are more important here than any of the other networks. It is essential that you get the size and aspect of your personal profile image right.

Note that the profile image will usually appear as a circle, so you will want to ensure that the important parts of the image appear in the central region.

The formal sizes and specifications for LinkedIn profile pictures are:

The LinkedIn Personal Background image covers a long skinny area. It can sometimes be difficult to find a suitable image for this area. Look for something that clearly depicts you and your interests.

The formal sizes and specifications for LinkedIn Personal Background Images are:

Just as an individual has a personal profile picture, a company will have its logo. The two types of mages appear in similar places (although the logo is square on the Company’s Profile Page).

You should upload two versions of your logo. The larger one is your standard company logo that appears in the header of your company profile page, and in the “Companies You May Want to Follow” section. The smaller logo is the brand image that shows up when your company is searched.

The formal sizes and specifications for LinkedIn company logos are:

The LinkedIn Company Cover image covers an even longer skinnier area than that of a personal profile – it covers the full width of the page. It can sometimes be difficult to find a suitable image for this area. Look for something that clearly depicts your business. (not your logo)

The formal sizes and specifications for LinkedIn Company Cover Images are:

You can share an image or a link to somewhere (like a blog post) that features an image.

The formal sizes and specifications for LinkedIn Shared Images or Links are:

Video is big business, and today, there’s no way you can publish video content without leveraging YouTube. The platform sees over 2.7 billion monthly users search its broad collection of content--an excellent opportunity to get yours in front of large and growing global audience.

Posting videos isn’t just about uploading content. To be competitive and get much-needed clicks, you have to make your videos look attractive. On YouTube, that means catchy headlines and killer images. Here’s a look at all image sizes you should be aware of as you prep to take over the platform.

Like other platforms, uploading your channel profile image is pretty straightforward. The only caveat with YouTube is that you can add a border to your channel profile image, but you’ll need to make sure your image fits first. Adding a boarding doesn’t allow for extra image size. As your image stays the same, be sure to make it look less cramped and aim for a more professional fit.

Here’s a look at channel profile image guidelines:

Your channel cover photo is the perfect opportunity to make an impression. Today, more YouTubers use theirs to include a catchy tagline, a large hero image, or a montage of visuals representing what they vlog about. YouTube’s recommended channel cover photo size is 2048 x 1152 pixels. YouTube also offers the following guidelines for channel cover photo sizes: 

Check out the 20 of the Most Popular YouTubers To Look Out For In 2024

YouTube is available on a variety of platforms. From Chromecast devices to tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers. And because of YouTube’s footprint, it’s essential to stick to recommended photo cover sizes so your iamges appear professional and not warped or pixelated.

Here’s a collection of photo cover sizes across devices. Also note, if you use YouTube’s recommended channel photo size, you don’t need to worry about these:

There are no two ways about it, video quality is a big deal on YouTube. If yours looks weird, there’s a good chance viewers may opt for something that offers a more pleasing experience. To help, YouTube provide a host of recommendations on the aspect ratios and dimensions. 

YouTube Video Upload Guidelines state that: 

And be sure to encode your videos for these resolutions:

Admittedly, Tumblr isn’t the first platform we think of when planning a social media campaign, but it’s still a valuable option. It’s home to over 606 million blogs. It’s also a little different from most other platforms. Its customizable nature makes it attractive, giving users the option of setting their own color scheme and, of course, using images. Tumblr allows you to update three types of images. These include a profile photo, a profile cover image, and a post image. Here are dimensions for each: 

Tumblr profile photos appear alongside all posts and comments you make. Recommended image size is 128 x 128 pixels and you use JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP file types.

Cover images are common across social media platforms. On Tumblr, you get to upload a large, 3000x1055 pixels image. Files types you can use include JPG, PNG, and GIF.

Like other social media platforms, recommended sizes are a guideline to ensure that content you post looks visually appealing.

Here are image size guidelines for Tumblr posts:

Pinterest is likely the web’s favorite referral link social media platform. SEMRush found that 90% of Pinterest links point away from the platform. Because Pinterst gets tons of views from visitors across the globe, it’s a hub for brands to post content and link back to owned online real estate to drive traffic, leads, and sales. If you’re looking to bank on Pinterest’s “linkablility”, make your images look amazing using these image sizes.

Pinterest’s profile images should be perfect square and 165 x 165 pixels in size. Profile images show on your Home and Following page, and when you pin content. On your home page, the image appears as a 165 x 165 pixels graphic. On you Following page and everywhere else on Pinterest your profile image will show as a 32 x 32 pixels grpahic. 

Image guidelines include:

Pins are unique. Because boards are designed to show a collection of pins, there isn’t a limit to the length of your pin image, but image width must stay 600 pixels at most. This makes Pinterest a great place to share infographics and other lengthier images. Pins all appear as 238 pixel graphics on your Main page and boards, with both instances being scaled to look uniform across the platform. For a quality look, Pinterest recommends an aspect ratio 2:3.

Pinterst boards are what really bring the platform together. Users get to create boards to host ideas and dreams of what they want. When creating your board, Pinterest recommended using these image guidelines:

The formal sizes and specifications for Facebook profile pictures are as follows:

The Facebook cover photo is the big image that appears at the top of a timeline. You can use it to show something that gives people an idea of what you are like as a brand or person. The minimum size is 400 x 150 pixels, but anything less than 820 x 312 pixels can appear stretched. You will also get a better result if you use a PNG file for cover photos with a lot of text or a logo.

An Instagram profile picture is a square photo, so it is best to upload an image with an aspect ratio of 1:1. The recommended upload size for Instagram profile pictures are 320 x 320 pixels. It is key that you use a high-quality image that clearly identifies you, whether as an individual or a business (if you have a business profile).

According to YouTube’s video upload guidelines, videos must maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio. In order to qualify as full HD, your dimensions must be at least 1,280 x 720 pixels. You should also make sure that you encode your videos for the following resolutions:

The sizes and specifications for LinkedIn company logos are:

The larger logo is your standard company logo that appears in the header of your company profile page and in the “Companies You May Want to Follow” section. The smaller logo is the brand image that shows up when your company is searched.