One moment you have the perfect cover runner for your account. The coming, it’s been resized and looks all pixelated and wrong. It does n’t help that information about sanctioned confines and image sizes is harder to find than a civil discussion on politics on Facebook. But, it’s not delicate if you consult this companion to social media image sizes on all important social media platforms!

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There are several specialised image formats that we’re keeping in mind for Instagram: “stories” refer to the ephemeral sharing of images and videos to select users, “highlights” mean the best bits of Instagram posts, pinned to the top of your wall, “carousel ads” allow multiple images per ad, say for multi-product galleries and “IGTV”, which is a standalone video app.

Instagram post sizes (feed photos):

Landscape: 1080 x 566 pixels

Portrait: 1080 x 1350 pixels

Square: 1080 x 1080 pixels

Supported aspect ratios: Anywhere between 1.91:1 and 4:5

Recommended image size: Width of 1080 pixels, height between 566 and 1350 pixels (depending on whether the image is landscape or portrait)

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Twitter’s specialties include “twitter cards” for attaching links with images to tweets and “moments”, which are pretty much the same thing as Instagram highlights. The latest addition to their flock of marketing features are “Fleets”, which can currently only be used on mobiles.

Twitter image sizes for profile photos: 400 x 400 (recommended)

Minimum image size: 200 by 200 pixels

Maximum file size: 2MB

Twitter header photo size: 1500 x 500 pixels (recommended)

Twitter images sizes for in-stream photos: 1600 x 900 pixels (recommended)

Minimum size: 600 by 335 pixels

Recommended aspect ratio: any aspect between 2:1 and 1:1 on desktop; 2:1, 3:4 and 16:9 on mobile

Supported formats: GIF, JPG and PNG

Maximum file size: Up to 5MB for photos and GIFs on mobile. Up to 15MB on the web.

Twitter card image size:

Twitter recognizes when a Tweet includes a URL. Twitter then crawls that website, pulling in content, including a Twitter image for the summary card.

Minimum size: 120 x 120 pixels

Supported formats: GIF, JPG, PNG

Maximum file size: 1MB

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Similarly to Instagram’s image criteria, Facebook focuses on posts, banners and stories for its visual content. Event pages and marketplace advertisements require specific dimensions. This platform also accommodates for 360 degree images, aka panoramas.

Facebook image sizes for cover photos: 851 x 315 pixels (recommended)

Display size desktop: 820 x 312 pixels

Display size smartphone: 640 x 360 pixels

Minimum size: 400 x 150 pixels

Ideal file size: Less than 100KB

Facebook timeline photo and post sizes:

Facebook automatically resizes and formats your photos when they are uploaded for the timeline to be 500 pixels wide and to fit the 1.91:1 aspect ratio.

But avoid pixelation or slow load times by remembering these sizes:

Recommended size: 1200 x 630 pixels

Minimum size: 600 x 315 pixels

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LinkedIn has the second biggest B2B marketing pool after Facebook and as of December, 2020, is advertising over 20 million job opportunities. With so much at stake, it pays to be exact with image and video dimensions and quality… luckily there are only a few to bear in mind on this social media platform, focusing on individual and company profiles.

LinkedIn Profile

Profile picture 400 x 400px; though you can use images up to 7680 x 4320px for better quality; max file size is 8mb

Cover image 1584 x 396px with aspect ratio 4:1

LinkedIn for business pages

Profile picture / logo 300 x 300px

Banner recommended size 1128 x 191px

Life tab main image recommended dimensions 1128 x 376px

Life tab custom modules recommended dimensions 502 x 282px

Life tab company photos 900 x 600px

LinkedIn posts

Images for blog post links are recommended to be 1200 x 627px with aspect ratio 1.91:1

Video post 256 x 144px–4096 x 2304px

LinkedIn stories

1080 x 1920px with aspect ratio 9:16

LinkedIn ads

Recommended size for company/spotlight ads logo 100 x 100px

Spotlight ads background image is recommended at 300 x 250px

Sponsored content images 1200 x 627px with aspect ratio 1.91:1

Sponsored content carousel images 1080 x 1080px with aspect ratio 1:1

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Videos take prime position for YouTube, meaning it’s only a couple of extra image dimensions you need to worry about to get your channel looking page

Profile picture 800 x 800px

Banner image 2560 x 1440px with aspect ratio 16:9; max file size 6mb

Youtube video

Standard video at a minimum size should be 1280 x 720px

File size limit 6mb

Video aspect ratio 16:9

For a better quality video (i.e. to be rented/sold), recommended dimensions 1920 x 1080px

Maximum video file size 128GB

Maximum video length 12 hours

Youtube ads

Skippable in-stream ads should be 12 seconds — 3 minutes

Non-skippable ads are 15 seconds, unless you’re in EMEA where they’re 20 seconds

Bumper ads are 6 seconds long

Discovery ads recommend 16:9/4:3 with a maximum file size of 1GB

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The only social media platform that allows users to search by images, this list could not be complete without the presence of Pinterest. Creative, collaborative and entirely focused around visual content, it’s a simple set of standards to practice your creative freedom upon.

Standard pin:

1000 x 1500px, aspect ratio 2:3

Square pin:

1000 x 1000px, aspect ratio 1:1

Long pin:

1000 x 2100px, aspect ratio 1:2.1

Infographic:

1000 x 3000px, aspect ratio 1:3 (this one may take some trial and error as technically speaking, elongated pins can end up being shortened in the feed)