Social Media Image Sizes: The 2026 Cheat Sheet

Platforms don't reject wrongly-sized images — they do something worse: they silently crop, stretch or recompress them. A pin uploaded at the wrong ratio loses its bottom third; a sharp logo becomes a mushy thumbnail; a horizontal photo posted as a story ships with giant dead bars. Sizing correctly costs ten seconds with an image resizer and is one of the few free wins in social publishing.

The master table

Platforms adjust specs occasionally; these reflect published guidance as of mid-2026. When a platform accepts a range, we list the size that survives recompression best.

The three ratios that cover almost everything

Memorize ratios, not pixel counts — the table above collapses into three shapes:

• 9:16 vertical (1080×1920) — the "full phone screen" shape: stories, Reels, TikTok, video pins. One export serves four platforms.
• ~1.91:1 landscape (1200×630) — the "link card" shape: Facebook feed, LinkedIn, Open Graph previews. If your blog sets only one social meta image, make it this one.
• 2:3 tall (1000×1500) — the Pinterest shape. Taller pins get more screen area in the feed, which is why 2:3 outperforms square there so consistently.

Why exact sizing beats "close enough"

Three things happen to a wrongly-sized upload, all bad:

1. Automatic cropping — the platform centers the crop with no idea where your subject or text sits. Captions and faces get cut with mechanical indifference.
2. Recompression — every platform recompresses uploads. An image that must also be resized gets recompressed after resampling, compounding the quality loss. Uploading at the native size means one gentle compression pass instead of two harsh ones.
3. Reach penalties by proxy — platforms don't punish wrong sizes directly, but engagement does: stretched or awkwardly cropped posts get fewer interactions, and the algorithm reads that as low quality.

A practical export workflow

For a piece of content going to several platforms:

1. Design or shoot at the largest size you'll need (usually the 9:16 vertical or the original photo).
2. Use the Image Resizer to export each target size — the aspect-ratio lock keeps proportions honest, and the JPEG/WebP quality slider at 85–90 gives platforms a clean master to recompress from.
3. Keep text and faces inside the central 80% of the frame — every platform's UI overlays icons and captions near the edges.
4. If the image is your own work headed for Pinterest or Instagram, consider a subtle watermark: reposts rarely carry the caption, but they always carry the pixels.

File format and weight notes

Platforms accept JPG and PNG everywhere, and most now accept WebP. Use JPG at quality 85–90 for photos and PNG for graphics with text (platform recompression is cruel to small text in JPGs — see why JPG smears text). Stay under each platform's size cap with a comfortable margin: heavier uploads are recompressed harder, so a 15 MB "maximum quality" upload can end up looking worse than a clean 1 MB one.

Keep this page handy

Bookmark the table, memorize the three ratios, and let the tools do the arithmetic. Correct sizing is the rare social-media tactic that is free, takes seconds, and works identically for a hobby account and a brand with millions of followers.