Social Media Image and Video Specs in 2026: The Sizes That Actually Matter

Almost every "my post looks blurry" problem is a spec problem wearing a mystery costume. A file exported at sixteen by nine and uploaded to a vertical feed gets cropped, letterboxed or padded, and then recompressed by the platform on top of the compression you already applied. The result is soft, or framed wrongly, or with the caption sitting under an interface element nobody accounted for.

The fix is not a longer list of numbers. It is three decisions made before the export: aspect ratio, master resolution, and safe zone. The platform figures below are the current values, with the caveat that platforms revise them and that advertising formats carry their own specifications — check the platform’s own ad spec page before a paid campaign, because that is the figure a rejection will be judged against.

Three numbers that govern everything

Aspect ratio decides the crop. A feed post is portrait-leaning at four by five on most platforms. A story or short video is nine by sixteen. A link preview or a horizontal video is sixteen by nine. Pick the ratio first, because everything downstream depends on it.

Master resolution decides the sharpness. Publish at the platform’s recommended width rather than at whatever the camera produced. Exporting a six thousand pixel photograph straight into a feed post gains nothing and costs upload time; the platform downsamples it anyway. Exporting below the recommended width, on the other hand, produces visible softness that no amount of sharpening fixes.

The safe zone decides legibility. Every vertical video surface draws its own interface over your file: a caption block at the bottom, action buttons down one side, a profile line at the top. Text placed in those regions is not cropped — it is covered, which is worse, because the file looks fine on your desktop.

Instagram

• Feed image, portrait: 1080 by 1350 pixels, four by five. This is the tallest ratio the feed still shows in full, and it takes the most screen height of any feed format.
• Feed image, square: 1080 by 1080. Still supported, still safe, now the smaller option.
• Reels, Stories, Live: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen.
• Carousel: same as feed. Keep every slide identical in ratio or the post jumps as the viewer swipes.
• Profile picture: at least 320 by 320, displayed as a circle, so keep the subject centred.
• Safe zone for Reels and Stories: keep text inside roughly the middle seventy percent vertically. The bottom fifth is covered by the caption and action row, and the top tenth by the header.

TikTok

• Video: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen. Anything else is padded with blurred bars or cropped.
• Profile picture: 200 by 200 minimum, displayed as a circle.
• Safe zone: the most aggressive of any platform. The right-hand column of buttons plus the caption block occupy a large share of the lower third. Plan for roughly the middle sixty percent of the frame carrying all text.
• Watermarks: a file downloaded from another platform arrives with its logo. Re-uploading it is the fastest way to reduce distribution on TikTok.

YouTube

• Standard video: 1920 by 1080, sixteen by nine.
• Shorts: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen, under sixty seconds by default.
• Thumbnail: 1280 by 720, sixteen by nine, under two megabytes. This is the single highest-leverage file on the platform — it is what the recommendation system shows before anything else.
• Channel banner: 2560 by 1440, with a central safe area of about 1546 by 423 that survives every device. Put the logo and the value proposition inside that band.
• Profile picture: 800 by 800, displayed as a circle.

X

• In-feed landscape image: 1600 by 900, sixteen by nine.
• In-feed portrait image: 1080 by 1350, four by five, which occupies more vertical space in the timeline.
• Header: 1500 by 500, with the lower left area clear of the profile picture overlay.
• Profile picture: 400 by 400, circular.

Facebook

• Feed image: 1080 by 1350, four by five.
• Reels and Stories: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen.
• Page cover: 820 by 312 on desktop, but the mobile crop is closer to square, so keep the message centred.
• Event cover: 1920 by 1005.
• Link preview: 1200 by 630, defined by the Open Graph tags on the destination page rather than by the share dialog.

LinkedIn

• Native feed image: 1080 by 1350, four by five.
• Link preview: 1200 by 627, roughly 1.91 to 1.
• Company page banner: 1584 by 396, with the profile logo overlapping the lower left.
• Document carousel: a PDF exported at four by five, one idea per page. Our guide to LinkedIn document carousels covers the layout rules.
• Profile picture: 400 by 400, circular.

Pinterest and Snapchat

• Pinterest standard pin: 1000 by 1500, two by three. The tallest ratio in common use, and the reason Pinterest rewards vertical design more than any other platform.
• Pinterest idea pin and video pin: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen.
• Pinterest board cover: 1000 by 1500, consistent across every pin in the board or the grid looks uneven.
• Snapchat ad and story: 1080 by 1920, nine by sixteen.

Threads and the text-first surfaces

Threads accepts images at the same ratios as Instagram, and four by five at 1080 by 1350 is the format that occupies the most space in a text-heavy feed. Video plays at nine by sixteen but is rarely watched with sound on a text network, so burned-in captions are close to mandatory.

On any surface where the post is mostly words, the image is a support element. A screenshot or a document image with legible text at small size out-performs a polished visual that says nothing. Design for reading at thumbnail scale, which in practice means one idea and one line of text.

File formats and compression

Stills: JPEG for photographs, PNG for anything with transparency or fine type. Avoid HEIC, which some upload paths still mishandle. Avoid upscaling — a small image enlarged to 1080 wide looks worse than the same image published at its native size.

Video: MP4 with H.264, standard frame rates, stereo audio at a sensible bitrate. High efficiency codecs produce smaller files and more compatibility problems, and a file that fails to process is a post that never went live.

Do not double-compress. Export at a high bitrate and let the platform do the one compression pass it is going to do anyway. Exporting a heavily compressed file means the platform compresses artefact into artefact.

Do not re-download and re-upload. A file pulled back off a platform has been compressed once, watermarked, and stripped of metadata. Cross-posting from the original master is always better than cross-posting from the published version. Our guide to repurposing video sets out the export ladder.

Type size, contrast and accessibility

At 1080 pixels wide, body text below roughly 30 pixels is unreadable on a phone at arm’s length, and headlines below about 60 pixels disappear at thumbnail scale. A rule that works: design the file, then view it on a phone at half brightness before publishing. If the headline needs squinting at, it is too small.

Contrast matters more than colour choice. Text over a photograph needs either a scrim, a solid block behind it, or a genuinely dark or light region. Mid-tone text over a busy mid-tone image is the most common legibility failure in social design.

Accessibility is not only a courtesy; it is reach. Add alt text to every image and captions to every video. Captions increase completion rates on silent viewing, and alt text is read by screen readers and indexed by search systems. Our accessibility guide covers the detail.

A two-master workflow that ends the re-exporting

Export two files from every shoot and templatise everything else.

Master A: 1080 by 1350. The portrait feed master. This is the base for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads feed posts. Square crops can be derived from it by trimming the sides, which is why the subject should sit in the middle two thirds of the frame.

Master B: 1080 by 1920. The vertical video master. Derive Reels, Stories, Shorts, TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest video from it. Keep the text inside the central band so the same file can carry a different platform's interface on top without losing the message.

Then derive the rest. Pinterest pins at 1000 by 1500, YouTube thumbnails at 1280 by 720, link previews at 1200 by 630. Five exports cover every surface a normal brand uses, and they can all come from two source files.

Name files with the campaign, the ratio and the date. The reason teams re-export the same asset four times is that nobody can tell which file is which six weeks later.

The five mistakes that keep recurring

• Exporting sixteen by nine into a vertical feed. The platform pads it with blurred bars, and the post reads as a repurposed television ad.
• Placing text in the interface zone. The file looks correct in the editor and is covered by a caption on the phone.
• Upscaling a small image. Softness is baked in at that point and cannot be recovered.
• Uploading the platform's own compressed output somewhere else. Watermark plus double compression is the worst combination available.
• Ignoring the thumbnail. A video that is beautiful at full size and illegible at thumbnail size loses the click before the content is ever judged.

A one-page checklist

Ratio chosen for the destination. Resolution at or above the platform’s recommended width. Text inside the safe band. Type at least 30 pixels at 1080 wide. Contrast tested on a phone. JPEG or PNG for stills, MP4 H.264 for video. Alt text and captions added. Exported from the master, not from a published file. Named so that the next person can identify it.

Ten checks, five exports, two masters. That is the entire system, and it removes the class of problem that otherwise consumes an afternoon each month without ever being named.