Recommended Image Sizes for Every Major Social Platform (2026)

Every platform crops, compresses, and re-scales what you upload — and an image at the wrong size gets the worst of all three. Upload at the recommended dimensions and your work arrives sharp, uncropped, and exactly as composed. Here are the sizes that matter in 2026, in one table, with the platform quirks worth knowing.

Why exact sizes matter

Platforms enforce aspect ratios first. A landscape photo posted to a 4:5 Instagram slot gets its sides chopped; a square logo uploaded as an X header gets stretched into a 1500×500 letterbox. Then comes re-compression: every service re-encodes uploads to save bandwidth, and images that need resizing on their servers tend to come out softer than images that already match the target.

Uploading at exactly the recommended size means you choose what gets cropped and your image skips the most damaging server-side transformations. It takes a minute and is the single highest-leverage step for looking sharp on social.

The recommended sizes also bake in headroom for high-density screens: most phones pack two to three physical pixels into every layout pixel, which is why a profile picture that displays at 150 px is best uploaded at 320 or 400. Meeting the spec means your image stays crisp on the sharpest screen anyone views it on.

The 2026 cheat sheet

Last verified: July 2026, against each platform’s official help documentation (linked in the sources below). Platforms change specs occasionally — when in doubt, check the source.

Instagram and Facebook

Instagram renders everything from 1080-pixel-wide sources. Square 1080×1080 remains the safe default, but portrait 1080×1350 occupies noticeably more feed height, which is why most photographers post 4:5. Stories and Reels are full-screen 9:16 at 1080×1920 — keep text and stickers away from the very top and bottom, where the UI overlays live. Profile pictures display tiny and circular; a 320×320 upload with the subject centered survives the circle crop.

Facebook’s page cover is an awkward 820×312 that crops differently on mobile, so keep anything important near the center. The 1200×630 feed size doubles as the standard Open Graph size — the preview image shown when any link is shared — making it worth getting right on your own website too.

YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch

YouTube thumbnails are 1280×720 and get scaled down to a few hundred pixels in search results, so bold subjects and large text win. The channel banner is the trickiest asset on this list: you upload 2560×1440, but TVs see all of it, desktops see a wide slice, and phones see only the central 1546×423 safe area. Anything essential — name, tagline, schedule — must live inside that safe zone.

TikTok covers are 9:16 at 1080×1920, and the grid on your profile shows a center crop of them, so compose for the middle. Twitch emotes upload at 112×112 but display as small as 28×28 in chat — simple shapes and exaggerated expressions read best; fine detail disappears entirely.

LinkedIn, X, and Discord

LinkedIn’s 1584×396 banner is a wide 4:1 strip, and on desktop your 400×400 profile photo overlaps its lower-left corner — keep that region clear of text. X headers (1500×500) similarly sit behind the avatar on the left side. X post images work well at 1600×900, matching the 16:9 timeline preview so nothing important gets trimmed.

Discord avatars upload at 512×512 and get displayed as small circles, so faces and logos should fill the frame; custom emoji are 128×128 with tight file-size limits, where a clean PNG with transparency looks best against both light and dark chat themes.

How to resize for every platform quickly

You could keep this table bookmarked and punch numbers into an editor — or let a tool carry the presets. PNGful’s social media image resizer has every size above built in, with safe-zone overlays for tricky assets like the YouTube banner, and it processes everything in your browser without uploading your photos anywhere.

A sensible workflow:

1. Start from your largest original — downscaling looks good, upscaling never does.
2. Cropto the target aspect ratio yourself, so the platform doesn’t choose for you.
3. Export at the exact recommended pixels — for the most common square size there’s a direct 1080×1080 resizer.
4. For avatars, a profile picture makerpreviews the circular crop and exports every platform’s size in one click.

Format matters as much as dimensions. Photographic posts travel best as high-quality JPEG; graphics with text or flat color — thumbnails, covers, emotes — hold their edges better as PNG, and transparency-dependent assets like Discord emoji must be PNG. Resist the urge to aggressively pre-compress: the platform will re-compress whatever you upload, and compressing twice compounds the damage. Give it the cleanest source that fits the upload limit, and only reach for a compressor when a file actually exceeds one.

Finally, treat this table as a living document. Platforms redesign feeds, and a spec that’s been stable for years can shift in an afternoon — the “last verified” date above and the official help-center links below are there so you can confirm anything mission-critical before a big campaign goes out.