Social media image sizes for 2026, from each site’s own help

Instagram’s own help page now puts the tallest photo it keeps uncropped at 3:4, which at 1080 pixels wide is 1080 × 1440. The familiar 4:5 portrait, 1080 × 1350, still fits, but it is no longer the limit. YouTube, read the same day, asks for thumbnails of 3840 × 2160, which four of the five photos we tested with couldn’t fill without being enlarged.

Below are the sizes as each site states them, with the page they came from. Then what happened when we cropped five public photos to every one of them with our own tools. Two of the limits turned out to be tighter than they look.

The sizes, from each site’s own help

The pages: Instagram on photo resolution, reel sizes and posts with several photos; Meta’s Stories ads requirements; YouTube on custom thumbnails and channel branding; LinkedIn on the profile cover image and profile photos that won’t upload; X on uploading a profile photo; Facebook on Page profile picture and cover sizes. We found no pixel size for ordinary Instagram stories on Instagram’s own help, so that row comes from Meta’s ads specification.

What we found saving at these sizes

We cropped five public photos from Wikimedia Commons (a bridge, a waterfall, a mountain from the air, an upright cat photo and the Eiffel Tower, from 1795 to 5388 pixels wide) to every size in the table, keeping the largest centred area of the right shape and saving JPG at quality 90, the default on most of our crop pages. Chromium 153, 24 September 2026.

YouTube’s 3840 × 2160 is bigger than most photos. Only the 18-megapixel bridge photo had 3840 pixels to spare across a 16:9 crop; the other four had to be enlarged, which adds no detail. At quality 90, two of the five also came out just over 2,000,000 bytes, the phone app’s 2 MB limit if it counts in thousands. Our thumbnail tool’s 2 MB switch brought them to 1.60 and 1.43 MB at quality 89.

Facebook’s 100 KB is tight. Three of the five covers went over 100,000 bytes at quality 90, by as little as 381 bytes. Dropping one step to quality 89 brought every one under, at 31 to 89 KB, and the drop was bigger than one step should be: 19 to 29% smaller. Our JPG encoder stores colour at full resolution from quality 90 up and at reduced resolution below it (exiftool reports 4:4:4 against 4:2:2), and we think that switch explains most of the jump; we didn’t test it separately. If a limit is close, quality 89 is the cheapest step you can take.

An upright phone photo now fits Instagram whole. Most phone cameras shoot 4:3, so an upright photo is 3:4, and our cat photo, 1795 × 2397, lost 4 rows of pixels on its way to 1080 × 1440. The same photo cut to the old 4:5 size, 1080 × 1350, loses 6.4% of the picture.

The other limits aren’t close. A 400 × 400 profile picture came out at 37 to 70 KB, under 4% of X’s 2 MB, and no LinkedIn cover passed 300 KB against its 8 MB. For those, leave quality at 90 or above.

What each site says it cuts

X says about 60 pixels at the top and bottom of a 1500 × 500 header can be cropped on some screens: 24% of the height. YouTube’s banner safe area, 1235 × 338 on a 2048 × 1152 upload, is 17.7% of the banner’s area, so more than four fifths of a banner is decoration that some devices won’t show. Facebook puts the Page’s profile picture over the left side of the cover, overlapping it by about 40 pixels on phones. Our banner and header tools draw those areas on the crop box, and the profile picture maker shows the circle.

For fitting a picture to a size without choosing the crop yourself, our crop, bars or stretch measurements show what each mode costs.