A Guide to Social Media Image Sizes in 2024
If you have ever uploaded a photo to your social media feed and found that the image quality isn’t as good as you’d like it to be, you’re not alone. Most sites that allow you to upload images will use their own set of parameters to resize and compress uploaded images to save file space and bandwidth.
If you’re happy with how your images are appearing when you post them, you might feel you can stop reading now and that’s OK. However, you might try using the resizing guide below to prep your images at the recommended sizes for the site or sites to which you upload photos. It could be that they end up looking better.
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Optimal Image Sizes for Popular Social Media Sites
Below is a list of image sizes commonly used by some popular social media sites. By resizing your images to the recommended pixel dimensions you can avoid, or at least minimize, the reduction in quality that often occurs when uploading images to these sites.
Keep in mind that the settings and parameters these sites use might change at any time. This is also true for the size recommendations themselves listed below. We will do our best to keep this page updated in the future so bookmark this page if you want to stay up to date on these settings.
Note: It is important to mention that your images may often not fit the exact proportions of the recommended sizes below. In those cases, I would recommend resizing based on the longer dimensions and letting the shorter fall where it will.
Facebook Image Sizes
Facebook has a wide variety of image sizes that are employed on its site depending on the location and use. The below listings are the recommendations according to the Meta for Business Guidelines and Facebook’s own Help Center.
- Feed Images: 1,080 x 1,350 pixels
- Page Profile Image: 170×170 (largest)
- Page Cover Photo: 851 x 315 (for fastest loading)
- Marketplace Images: 1,200 x 1,200 pixels
- Stories: 1,080 x 1,920
Instagram Image Sizes
Images on Instagram are displayed at 1,080 pixels at the widest with a maximum of 1,350 pixels in height (it’s not surprising that this is the same as in Facebook’s News Feed). Personally, I make my images square by cropping them in the 1:1 ratio and letting the extra space be filled with black, white, or a color that works well with the image. This way no heads or feet are cut off when images are displayed in the “grid” in my profile. This info comes from Instagram’s Help and is also found in the Meta for Business Guidelines.
- Profile Images: 320 x 320 pixels
- Feed Images: 1,080 x 1,350 pixels
YouTube Image Sizes
Although YouTube is obviously about video, there are many places where still images are used within the YouTube interface. The online help system provided the following information for the various ways still images are used. However, these were not all found together so I might not have found “every” use of still images.
- Profile Image: 800 x 800 pixels
- Video Thumbnail Size: 1,280 x 720 pixels
- Channel Cover Image: 2,560 x 1440 pixels
- Display Ads: 300 x 250 pixels
- Overlay Ads: 480 x 60 pixels
- Companion Banner Ads: 300 x 250 pixels
Twitter Image Sizes
Twitter has recommended image sizes for profile and header images in its help center but I was unable to find anything specific for feed images there. Some research, and experimenting for confirmation, showed that images that are “instream” are displayed at 600 x 335 pixels but can be clicked and viewed as large as 1,200 x 675 pixels.
- Profile Images: 400 x 400 pixels
- Header Images: 1,500 x 500 pixels
- In-Stream Images: 1,200 x 675 pixels
LinkedIn Image Sizes
I really appreciate LinkedIn’s support team for making it easy to find its set of recommended image sizes. The following comes from the company’s online help.
- Logo Image: 268 x 268 pixels
- Cover Image: 128 x 191pixels
- Main Image: 1,128 x 376 pixels
- Custom Modules: 502 x 282 pixels
- Company Photos: 900 x 600 pixels
TikTok Image Sizes
TikTok is all about video but profile images are a thing there so they do offer a recommendation.
- Profile Image: 200 x 200 pixels
Pinterest Image Sizes
There are quite a lot of different types of image sizes and aspect ratios that end up in various areas of Pinterest. Below is what I have found but there might be others I missed. Much of this was trial and measure but the standard pins recommendation comes from Pinterest’s best practice information.
- Profile Image: 165 x 165 pixels
- Standard Pins: 1,000 x 1,500 pixels
- Square Pins: 1,000 x 1,000 pixels
- Long Pins: 1,000 x 2,100 pixels
- Infographic Pins: 1,000 x 3,000 pixels
- Story Pins: 1,080 x 1,920 pixels
In addition to the list above, there are some social media sites geared specifically at photographers and other visual creators that I wanted to drop here as well. Many of these sites offer lower compression and larger-sized images so you may find recommended pixel dimensions are higher than the sites listed above.
Behance Image Sizes
According to guidance from the Behance site “We display all images at 1400px wide in the Project View and up to 2800px in the Lightbox View which is triggered when you click on an image.” So I would recommend sizing to 2,800 pixels on the long side if your image is at least that large.
- Uploaded Images: 2,800 pixels on longest edge
Vero Image Sizes
This social media network has been around since 2015 and while it may not be as familiar as Instagram or YouTube it does offer high-quality image sharing. Images displayed on Vero can be up to 3,000 pixels on the long side. Images that are larger will be scaled down to that size.
- Uploaded Images: 3,000 pixels on longest edge
Youpic Image Sizes
Youpic is another social media network that seems to have been flying under the mainstream radar. It’s geared specifically at professional/experienced photographers and has a feel of Instagram meets Twitter. Recommended image size is 2,048 pixels on the long side.
- Uploaded Images: 2,048 pixels on longest edge
Conclusion
The recommendations in this article are certainly subject to change and may or may not fit into your workflow. For my own part, I typically size my images for social media posts to 2,000 pixels on the long side and I’ve found this produces good-quality images for my use. However, if you are finding your image uploads are suffering from softness and/or compression artifacts, I would try the above settings and see if this improves things.
