Social Media Image Sizes: The 2026 Cheat Sheet

Image size guides go stale fast and most of them never say when they were checked. This one is dated, sourced, and paired with the workflow that actually matters: how to produce a handful of crops that cover every placement instead of designing a new image for every single platform.

The master table by network and placement

Platform	Placement	Recommended size	Aspect ratio
Instagram	Feed post	1080 x 1350 px	4:5
Instagram	Story / Reel	1080 x 1920 px	9:16
Facebook	Feed post	1080 x 1359 px	roughly 4:5
Facebook	Cover photo	851 x 315 px	wide
LinkedIn	Feed post	1200 x 627 px	roughly 1.91:1
LinkedIn	Banner/cover	1128 x 191 px	wide
X	Image post	1280 x 720 px (landscape) or 720 x 1280 px (vertical)	16:9 or 9:16
Pinterest	Pin	1000 x 1500 px	2:3
TikTok	Video / cover	1080 x 1920 px	9:16
YouTube	Thumbnail	1280 x 720 px	16:9

Source: Hootsuite’s social media image sizes guide, last updated August 4, 2026. [VERIFY: recheck every dimension against each platform’s own current specs at publish time and on a quarterly refresh, these move without a platform announcement]

Safe zones: where text dies in crops

Every placement in that table gets covered, in part, by something you do not control: a profile picture and username on a Story, a caption overlay on a feed post, the crop a platform’s own algorithm applies when it generates a thumbnail from a larger image. The safe zone is whatever is left after you account for all of that, and it is almost always smaller than the full canvas.

The practical rule: keep any text, logo, or critical visual element inside the middle 80 percent of a Story or Reel canvas, vertically and horizontally, since the top and bottom edges are where a platform’s own UI chrome tends to sit. For a feed image, keep important content out of the bottom-right corner specifically, since that is where a caption overlay or a platform badge is most likely to land depending on the app and device. Design right up to the edge and you will eventually find out the hard way which corner a given app decided to cover.

The one-asset-three-crops workflow

Producing a bespoke image for all ten placements in the table above does not scale, and it does not need to. Design one source asset wide and detailed enough to survive cropping, then generate exactly three derivatives from it: a square 1:1 crop, a vertical 4:5 or 9:16 crop, and a landscape 16:9 crop.

Those three cover the practical range. The square handles anywhere a tight square still shows up. The vertical crop covers Instagram and Facebook feed, Stories, Reels, and TikTok, the largest cluster of placements in the table. The landscape crop covers LinkedIn, X, and YouTube thumbnails. You are not designing per platform anymore, you are designing per aspect ratio, and three ratios happen to cover essentially everything in the table above.

The one habit that makes this work: compose your source asset with the subject centered and enough breathing room around it that all three crops can pull from the same original without cutting off anything critical. A subject pushed hard against one edge in the source image survives a square crop and fails the vertical one, or the reverse.

Where automation checks your crops

A per-platform preview, checking how a given crop actually looks on each destination before it publishes, catches the case where a safe-zone assumption was wrong for one specific placement, without you eyeballing every image against every platform’s current UI by hand. PostSider’s per-platform preview does exactly this, and pairs with the media library for storing the three-crop set once and reusing it across every post that draws from the same source asset, plus upload-from-URL for pipelines that generate or source images elsewhere and only need PostSider to place and preview them correctly.

Common failure gallery

A short, labeled list of the mistakes that come up most, illustrative rather than a real image roundup: a logo placed dead-center in a square source image gets clipped on both sides in a 9:16 vertical crop, since the width shrinks relative to the height. A caption baked directly into the image, rather than added as platform text, blocks itself out entirely on a Story that overlays a username at the exact spot the baked-in text sits. A landscape source image cropped straight down the middle for a vertical placement cuts a subject in half instead of recentering it, because a naive crop keeps the same horizontal center instead of reframing around the subject.

Each of these traces back to the same root cause: designing for one specific platform’s canvas instead of designing a source asset that survives being reframed into three different shapes.

Keep the numbers current

Recheck this table before a paid campaign or a print-adjacent asset depends on exact pixels, since platforms change these without a formal announcement and a third-party guide can lag behind by months. Expect a refresh here on the same quarterly cadence as the character limits table, its companion piece for the text side of the same discipline.

If an agent or a script is producing images for your queue, PostSider’s per-platform preview is the check that catches a bad crop before it reaches your calendar, and the 12 tools an AI agent needs covers why a preflight check like that earns its place on an agent’s tool list instead of only showing up as a failure after the fact.