How to Resize Images for Social Media
The right image sizes for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok. Includes a quick-reference table you can bookmark.
You spend twenty minutes picking the perfect photo, upload it to Instagram, and boom. The app crops off your friend’s head on the left side. The caption underneath looks awkward because the preview thumbnail is all wrong.
That’s what happens when your image doesn’t match the platform’s expected dimensions. Every social network has specific aspect ratios and pixel requirements. Miss them, and the app decides how to crop for you. Spoiler: it never picks well.
The cheat sheet: exact image sizes for every major platform
I tested all of these in January 2025 by uploading images to each platform and checking what actually displayed. Some of these numbers differ from what the official docs say because the apps have changed their rendering since those docs were written.
| Platform | Placement | Size (px) | Aspect Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feed Post (square) | 1080 x 1080 | 1:1 | |
| Feed Post (portrait) | 1080 x 1350 | 4:5 | |
| Story | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 | |
| Reel Cover | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 | |
| Cover Photo | 820 x 312 | ~2.6:1 | |
| Shared Post Image | 1200 x 630 | ~1.9:1 | |
| Profile Picture | 170 x 170 | 1:1 | |
| Twitter/X | Header | 1500 x 500 | 3:1 |
| Twitter/X | Post Image | 1200 x 675 | 16:9 |
| Company Banner | 1584 x 396 | 4:1 | |
| Post Image | 1200 x 627 | ~1.9:1 | |
| TikTok | Profile Picture | 200 x 200 | 1:1 |
| TikTok | Video | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 |
Bookmark this page. You’ll come back to it.
A couple things I noticed while testing: Facebook displays your cover photo at 820x312 on desktop but trims the top and bottom on mobile. Keep important text and faces in the center 820x200 band. Twitter’s header gets cropped by roughly 30px on each side, so don’t put anything critical near the edges.
How I resize images (without installing anything)
I use ImgPrism/resize for this. It runs entirely in the browser. Nothing gets uploaded to a server, which means it works even when my Wi-Fi is being terrible.
Here’s my process. I open the resize tool, drop in the photo, type the target width and height, and hit the button. The whole thing takes about four seconds per image. I timed it.
One detail that trips people up: when you enter width and height, pay attention to the lock icon next to the fields. If it’s locked, changing one dimension auto-adjusts the other. This keeps your aspect ratio intact. If you unlock it, you can set any dimensions you want, but you risk stretching the image.
For social media posts, keep the lock on. Always.
Keeping the aspect ratio right (why your images look weird)
Stretching is the number one mistake I see. You take a landscape photo that’s 4000x3000 and force it into a 1080x1080 square. The result? Everything looks squished. People look shorter and wider than they really are.
The fix is simple. Crop first, then resize. Here’s what I mean.
Say you have a 4000x3000 landscape photo and need a 1080x1080 Instagram square. If you resize without cropping, the tool has to either stretch or letterbox. Neither looks good. What you should do is crop the original to a square first (trim off the sides), then resize that square down to 1080x1080.
When I need to do this, I crop the image to the right aspect ratio first, then run it through the resize tool. Two steps, but the result looks clean every time.
Batch resizing when you have a pile of images
Last month I had 47 product photos to post across three platforms. Doing them one at a time was not happening.
The resize tool on ImgPrism lets you drop multiple files at once. I dragged all 47 images in, set the dimensions to 1200x630 (which works for both Facebook and LinkedIn posts), and processed the whole batch. It took about 90 seconds from start to finish.
My workflow for batch jobs looks like this:
- Group photos by target platform
- Process each group with the dimensions for that platform
- Download the results as a zip
Pro tip: name your files before resizing. Something like “product-facebook-01.jpg” saves you from guessing which version is which later.
Mistakes I’ve made (so you don’t have to)
Stretching portraits into landscape. I once uploaded a team photo as a LinkedIn banner without cropping it first. Everyone looked comically wide. A client noticed. Not my finest moment. Always match your aspect ratio before resizing.
Ignoring the safe zones. Instagram crops your profile picture into a circle. If your logo has text near the corners, that text disappears. Same deal with Facebook cover photos on mobile. Keep important stuff in the center 60% of any image.
Using tiny source images. I tried to upscale a 300x300 logo to 1080x1080 for an Instagram post. It came out blurry. Downscaling works great. Upscaling rarely does. Start with the largest version of your image you can find.
Forgetting to check the preview. Every platform shows you a preview before you post. Use it. I’ve caught at least a dozen bad crops this way that I would have missed otherwise.
Not saving the originals. I resized a photo, posted it, then deleted the original because I thought I was done. Two weeks later I needed the same photo in a different size for a different platform. Had to redo the whole shoot. Keep your source files.
A quick process you can follow every time
When I have an image to post, here’s what I do. I check the table above for the right dimensions. I crop the image to the correct aspect ratio. I resize it to the exact pixel count. Then I check the preview on the platform before hitting publish.
Takes about thirty seconds once you get the hang of it. And you never have to deal with a badly cropped post again.