A Detailed Guide to Social Media Image Sizes
Every image size you’ll need for each platform
92% of marketers agree that visual content takes up a lion’s share of their marketing campaign. If you’re one of them, you’re already familiar with the struggles of promoting a brand on social media through visuals. Broken images, degraded quality, half of your post image being cropped, these are only a few challenges you meet when uploading your visuals to social media platforms.
Let us remedy these problems for you. This detailed guide will inform you of the best image size for most popular social networks. We’ll tell you how to crop and resize your pictures efficiently, regardless of whether you’re preparing posts for Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. As a bonus, we’ll share a secret where to store your images so you didn’t care about access anymore and couldn’t mix up the versions.
We Start With Facebook: A Different Size for Each Type of Image
When it comes to images, Facebook turns out a whimsical social networking platform. Its creators regularly update the requirements for Facebook's optimal image dimensions.
Interestingly, Facebook will never stretch or distort your image. Whenever any size issues arise, it will crop your photo straight away. For this very reason, the best strategy for a marketer is to double-check the new Facebook guidelines at least once a month. Or maybe you’d better discover that half of your logo was relentlessly cut one day?
So, currently, the ideal image size for Facebook is 1200 x 628 pixels. Remember that the width of your images should be at least 500 pixels. Otherwise, the platform will resize it by itself and adapt the height respectively.
Your profile photo (180 x 180 pixels) plays so far the most important role on Facebook. Don’t kid yourself that this square picture in the upper corner of your page is too small to notice. Apart from your page, it appears on your posts in the news feed, your comments, search results, and any other place across Facebook. What else is it, if not the face of your brand?
By the way, have you heard that Facebook moved a profile image for business pages to the left? The new-look makes your brand logo contrast with personal accounts even more. But no need to worry: the size dimensions didn’t change (180 x 180 pixels).
Get familiar with the full list of image sizes used on Facebook:
Instagram: Image Width Is Your Key Benchmark
Width is of the utmost importance to Instagram images. Earlier, the platform even pursued a policy for posts to fit a square form 1080 x 1080 pixels. Fortunately, Instagram developers added portrait (1080 x 1350 pixels) and landscape (1080 x 608 pixels) resolution to provide users with more freedom. But, as you can see, the ideal width of 1080 pixels stayed.
From this perspective, as long as the width of your image is 1080 pixels with a height between 566 and 1350 pixels, Instagram won’t crop your images. But whenever your uploaded picture is less than 320 pixels wide, it’ll be automatically enlarged. Be attentive as it might look clumsy and pixelated.
The same as with Facebook, your brand profile image (180 x 180 pixels) will be visible next to every photo you post. So no wonder there are an awful lot of nuances you should control when choosing your profile image.
First, remember to center all the important elements so they weren’t cropped out when displayed in stories or posts. Secondly, don’t use the dimensions lower than 110 x 110 pixels. It may seem ok on the app but Instagram will definitely enlarge the image on the desktop. Thirdly, keep your profile image eye-catching and recognizable. Your brand logo is probably the best choice as users will differentiate your page by this image.
Finally, Instagram stories (1080 x 1920 pixels) are at the very heart of Instagram. Avoid placing your text or logo at the top or bottom 250 pixels of your image. This is where your profile photo and Instagram buttons will be. Here’s the summary of Instagram image size requirements:
Twitter: Rely On Mobile Size Requirements
An interesting feature of Twitter image dimensions is the advantage of its mobile version over the desktop. Follow mobile size specifications, and your images will look perfect on the desktop too. But somehow this strategy doesn’t work in reverse.
So the ideal image size for Twitter is 1200 x 675 pixels. No matter what, we advise you not to go lower than 600 x 335 pixels. Otherwise, your followers will see a distorted image every time they click on it.
Uploading a post image wouldn’t pose any problems as long as you’re using optimized dimensions. But be cautious when you’re sharing multiple images: Twitter tends to crop pictures based on their number in your tweet. To make it worse, the network resizes images differently on mobile and desktop versions. Thank goodness, Twitter has incorporated machine learning to crop your photos to the most interesting part.
Twitter cards are one more particularity of Twitter you as a marketer should not ignore. As a platform that gives your brand more exposure and improved post engagement, Twitter cards have their own image size requirements, 280 x 150 pixels. By the way, don’t limit yourself to conventional image file formats (JPG and PNG). What about making your brand stand out with a GIF image? Unlike other social media, Twitter supports it too.
A few other size dimensions you may need to post on Twitter:
Other Image Size Requirements You May Want to Know
Since social media is on the rise today, and we have a great variety of social networking platforms, this post won’t be complete if we don’t touch on their size guidelines too. Here’s a brief overview of image dimensions for LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube (ping us if you need size requirements for some other platform):
So How to Reduce Image File Size?
Before we dive deeper into looking for the best image size converter, we need to connect the dots and figure out the terminology. So, the dimensions (measured in pixels) are the image height and width. To put it differently, this is the space your picture occupies on the screen. File size (measured in kilobytes and megabytes) is about the space taken up in storage.
When it comes to image size for social media, we usually mean dimensions even though we use this word interchangeably with “image size.” To some extent, they are still related if we consider that image size increases with larger dimensions. That’s why resizing the image for social networking sites presupposes reducing image width and height, which leads to file size compression at the end. Actually, there is a lot of software and online tools to come to the rescue here, and you won’t need to disturb your graphic designer to adapt the dimensions for your images.
Here are a few options to consider:
- Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you’re a long-term user of Photoshop, resizing images with this tool won’t cause any difficulties for you.
- GIMP if you’re not a Photoshop fan;
- Fotor has a very straightforward and user-friendly tool;
- Paint.net may seem outdated at first but a good choice for beginners in photo editing.
Prefer to move all your work online? Give a try to one of these tools:
Where to Store All Those Social Media Pics?
So now you’ve resized and compressed all your images and found out that you have nearly 20 different images. Your PC is a total mess, already crammed with thousands of pics. And once you store a few more pictures on your computer, you risk losing them forever. Or maybe you’re an active Google Drive user and send the link to your colleagues every time you update the image size?
Digital asset management solutions, like Pics.io, is the tool that will make your life easier and end your storage and sharing problems. On the one side, it’s handy online-based storage where you can upload all your updated images, and your colleagues and you will have quick and easy access to them. On the other side, DAM is a collaborative tool, so your team can leave comments under your images, tag others, or mark specific areas on the asset. Plus, DAM is very straightforward and intuitive software, so you don’t need to be tech-savvy to work with it.
In a nutshell, when you choose the right dimensions and file size for your social media images; when you resized and compressed them correctly; when you uploaded them to your storage and shared with colleagues, now you’re ready to update your social media accounts and make your brand shine.
