As often happens around this time of year, Make a Website Hub have released their guidelines and cheat sheet for the image sizes we should be using on social media. Here, we’re going to go over the two that are most relevant to photographers. Facebook and Instagram. If you want to know the others, be sure to download their cheatsheet PDF.
Facebook has a whole slew of different types of image for different purposes. There’s cover photos, profile photos, shared images, shared links, event images and all sorts. Here’s the guide for those, how Facebook affects each, and how they’re different for pages vs profiles.
Cover Photo: 820 x 310 pixels (a preferred maximum file size of 100 KB)
You can edit and add creative images as your cover photo that represents you or your business in the correct sense. – Appear on page at 820 x 310 pixels
- Anything less will be stretched.
- inimum size of 399 x 150 pixels.
- Smartphones display as 640 x 360
- For best results, upload an RGB / JPG file less than 100 KB.
- Images with a logo or text maybe best as a PNG file.
Profile Picture: 180 x 180 pixels
Unlike the cover photo, which only appears on your Facebook page, your Facebook profile picture will be seen on your page, on posts where you comment, on the timelines of others where you post messages, in search results of Facebook’s Open Graph and so on. In short, it represents you at most places on the largest social networking platform.
Shared Image: 1200 x 630 pixels
You can engage your friends or business followers in meaningful conversations by sharing useful images on your Facebook timeline. These will appear in the news feeds of your friends and followers. Check this post for more information on image sizes for Facebook
Shared Link: 1200 x 627
Image Guidelines:
- Recommended upload size of 1200 x 627
- Square Photo: Minimum 154 x 154px in feed.
- Square Photo: Minimum 116 x 116 on page.
- Rectangular Photo: Minimum 470 x 246 pixels in feed.
- Rectangular Photo: Minimum 484 x 252 pixels on page.
Facebook will scale photos under the minimum dimensions. For better results, increase image resolution at the same scale as the minimum size.
Event Image: 1920 x 1080 px
Image Guidelines
- Facebook will scale down to minimum dimensions: 470 × 174 pixels.
- Shows in feed: 470 × 174 pixels.
Highlighted Image: 1200 x 717 pixels
Image Guidelines
- Will appear on your page at 843 x 504 pixels.
- Choose a higher resolution at that scale for better quality.
Instagram is another one that’s seen a little bit of a transition in image size over the years. Although the regular square image sizes haven’t changed, it now supports landscape and portrait orientation images, as well as vertical video for Stories. That last one has been something that’s confused a lot of people, but Make a Website Hub are here to save the day.
Profile Picture: 110 x 110 pixels
Photo Size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Video to Stories: 750 x 1334 pixels
On Instagram, you can upload a video to your timeline or share it to Instagram stories. The correct size to use will be determined by where you publish it.
The maximum duration of the video should be 10 seconds.
Landscape Size: 1080 x 566 pixels
Portrait Size: 1080 x 1350 pixels
Instagram portrait size recommended: 1080px x 1350px. However, Instagram will show it as a 600 x 749 pixel image.
Photo Thumbnails: 161 x 161 pixels
For all types of Instagram images, you need to maintain an aspect ratio of 1:1. So, all your images will appear in square dimensions. You need to take special care with the image quality because limited text content is shared on this platform. It is more about the pictures and visuals!
Other platforms…
As well as these two, the list covers YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr and more. To check out the full list, see the Make a Website Hub website, or download their PDF cheatsheet.
You’ll notice on some of the image sizes, that they’re much larger than they might appear on your screen, or completely the wrong aspect ratio. This is due to the way many sites use this image on diffent platforms. YouTube’s channel header image, for example, displays a different crop depending on whether you’re on the desktop, a phone, a tablet or watching through a TV. Some of the other sizes are also a minimum, not an absolute, but you will generally want to respect the aspect ratio.
Images and excerpts courtesy of Make a Website Hub and used with permission.
