Social Media Image Sizes: The 2026 Cheat Sheet

Every social platform crops, scales, and re-encodes the images you upload. Picking the right dimensions before you post is the difference between a design you controlled and a design the platform decided for you. This is the size reference plus the reasoning behind it, so you know which numbers matter and which you can ignore.

The Social Media Studio ships with these sizes as one-click presets, and it does the scaling in your browser with the Canvas API, so a client photo or an unreleased product shot never gets uploaded anywhere. Step-by-step: see our guide to resizing images for social media if you want the click-by-click walkthrough. This article covers the why.

The size reference

These are the presets available in the tool, with the aspect ratio each one locks you into.

Aspect ratio beats resolution

Uploading a 6000 pixel wide camera file does not make your post sharper. Every platform downsamples to its own display width and re-encodes to its own compression settings, so the extra pixels are discarded on arrival. What survives the trip is your composition. If the ratio is wrong, the platform center-crops or letterboxes, and the crop lands wherever the algorithm puts it - usually straight through your headline or your subject's face.

That is why the practical rule is: match the ratio exactly, then use a resolution roughly equal to the platform's display width. 1080 pixels wide covers nearly every mobile feed. Going far above that mostly costs upload time.

Safe zones: design for the crop you cannot see

Vertical formats

Stories, Reels, and TikTok all overlay interface elements on top of your image: profile chips and captions near the top, action buttons down the right edge, and a send or comment bar along the bottom. Keep the center band of a 1080 x 1920 canvas free of anything that must be read, and treat the outer 15 percent on each end as decoration only.

Wide formats

Link previews and banners get cropped hardest. A 1584 x 396 LinkedIn banner shows the middle on desktop but pulls in tighter on mobile, and profile photos punch a hole in the lower left on many layouts. Put the logo and any tagline near the horizontal center.

Text that survives re-compression

Social platforms re-encode uploads as JPEG or WebP, and lossy compression is brutal on thin type against busy photography. Three things help, all of them available in the studio's text panel:

• Weight over size. A heavy face like Impact holds up better at small sizes than a light serif scaled up.
• Drop shadow. The optional shadow separates letters from photographic noise, which is what makes text look muddy after compression.
• Placement by hand. Drag the caption where you want it, or type exact X and Y values when you are matching a template across several posts.

The tool exports PNG, which means the version you download has no compression artifacts of its own. The platform's encoder gets a clean source instead of one that has already been squeezed twice.

Making one image work in three places

Shoot or crop wide, then step down. Start from a landscape source, export the 16:9 version first, then switch presets and reposition your text for the square and vertical cuts. Undo and redo let you back out of a text placement without reloading the image, so a three-format set is a couple of minutes of work rather than three separate design sessions.

If your source photo is enormous and you are only feeding it to a feed anyway, shrinking it first is worth doing - see resizing versus compressing for how those two operations differ. And if the post is a short animation rather than a still, our notes on keeping GIF file sizes down apply to feed uploads too.

Why this runs in your browser

Most online resizers are a web form in front of someone else's server. Yours is not: the image is decoded into a canvas element on your machine, scaled there, and handed back to you as a download. Campaign artwork under embargo, screenshots of internal dashboards, and personal photos all stay on the device they started on.