The best sizes of images and photos on social media in 2024

You can thus introduce users to your company, establish a relationship with them and to bind them to your brand.

There is just a lot of competition on your target audience's timeline. There are many news stories, posts from friends or family and, of course, other organizations bombarding your target audience with content.

So you understand that you have to pull out all the stops to create the ideal message.

Previously, I wrote about what you can post as a business owner to boost your engagement, the ideal length of those posts and the best time to publish your brand new post. But that actually includes something about images.

Specifically, the social media formats of images and photos in 2021. Because those still change sometimes, and it would be a shame if you put a lot of time and effort into developing a cool visual only to find that Facebook or Instragram cropped it so that your logo is no longer visible.

To name a few.

So that's why I'm listing the ideal social media dimensions for images and photos by channel for you.

But first, the importance of social media images

People process visual information better than text or sound. At least, they remember information much better when there are visual elements to a message. Because that makes it easier to make associations.

And that's exactly why social media posts with images actually always do better than simple status updates with just a line of text.

Simple as that.

That's why you should always use images or photos with your social media posts. Preferably in the right format, of course, so that you make optimal use of the space that the various channels offer you.

But then what is that right format?

The best social media dimensions

Each channel uses different dimensions. In turn, each medium scales images to a different size. That means that each channel displays your image differently, so you have to scale or crop an image multiple times to get the optimal result on each of those individual channels.

This can be quite a chore, but not if you just have the ideal dimensions of images and photos on social media at hand.

So hence, an overview of most common sizes:

Facebook

Profile picture: 180 x 180 px
Cover: 820 x 312 px (minimum)

These days, Facebook is a lot more flexible when it comes to photos and images in posts. Visuals accompanying a post were best displayed at a size of 1200 x 630 pixels, but nowadays they can also do just fine in 1200 x 1200 or even 1080 x 1080. The advantage is that you can also use those same photos for your Instagram.

The 1200 x 630 does concern a landscape photo. Larger in width than in length, in other words. For vertical images, keep a ratio of 3:2 with a maximum height of 1800 px. That means a size of 1800 x 1200 px for a sharp, vertical image.

For the image displayed with a link, Facebook uses a ratio of 1.91:1. That equates to an image 1200 x 628 pixels that you can set for each link yourself in this way.

Have you created an event on Facebook? For its header, the social medium again uses a ratio of 16:9. Therefore, for the best results on all screens, use an image of 1920 x 1080 px.

Instagram

Profile photo: 180 x 180 px.

For regular posts on Instagram, use images with a 1:1 ratio for square images. With a minimum of 1080 pixels. Logically, that means a size of (at least) 1080 x 1080 px.

For landscape or landscape photos, Instagram uses a ratio of 1.91:1. Again with a minimum of 1080 pixels. That means your landscape image must be a minimum of 1080 x 608 px to display properly.

For vertical images, the ratio is 4:5. And you guessed it, with a minimum of 1080 px. Therefore, the ideal size for portrait photos is 1080 x 1350 px.

Instagram Stories, however, are always displayed vertically. Before that, with a size of 1080 x 1920 px, your story will usually display well on any little screen.

That's it.

LinkedIn

At LinkedIn, we distinguish between your company page and your personal profile. This is because different formats apply to the former:

LinkedIn company logo: 300 x 300 px
LinkedIn cover image: 1536 x 768 px
Sponsored content image: 1200 x 627 px
Hero image: 1128 x 376 px
Business banner: 646 x 220 px

For your personal profile, it is better to use the following formats:

Profile picture: 400 x 400 px
Background / header: 1584 x 396 px

Do you include images with your updates? Of course you do. Then put your images in the following size and you'll be fine: 1200 x 1200 px (desktop) or 1200 x 628 px (mobile).

And since we don't know where exactly people see your image, maybe it's best to stick with the mobile sizes. In fact, that 1200 x 628 px is also exactly the size of the image when you share a link. Handy, isn't it?

Twitter

Profile picture: 400 x 400 px
Header: 1500 x 500 px

Photos and images attached to your tweets display best with a 2:1 ratio. That means it's best to include images of at least 1024 x 512 px to ensure that your post displays nicely and fully on any device.

By the way, for ads on Twitter, it's better to use 800 x 428 px. And for Twitter cards, 1200 x 628 px is considered the ideal size.

Pinterest

Profile picture: 180 x 180 px
Board cover: 600 x 600 px
Board display image: 222 x 150 px

Pinterest itself gives clear guidelines: the optimal pin has a ratio of 2:3. As an example, they themselves give 600 x 900 px. But 1000 x 1500 px gives an even better result in our opinion.

But the channel also indicates that square pins of 600 x 600 px display just fine and that longer, vertical pins have an optimal ratio of 1:2.1 (which is 600 x 1260 px).

At least with those formats, you're stuck with your pins as well as the thumbnails.

TikTok

TikTok is conquering the hearts of many young social media users today, in 2021 that is. Although the platform only lets you share videos (preferably in 1080 x 1920 px), it also lets you upload an image.

As a profile picture, that is. And make it 200 x 200 px.

Finally ...

With this, I hope to have given you guidance as to the ideal social media dimensions for images and photos in 2021.

Do you still have questions? Are you still missing certain formats or have the dimensions changed again? Be sure to let me know in the comments!