Every social image size that matters, in one place

There are fewer real sizes than there are placements

Once you lay them out, most social image sizes collapse into a handful of shapes. That is the useful observation, because it tells you which images you can export once and reuse, and which genuinely need their own crop.

So one vertical export covers five placements, one square covers three, and one 1200 × 630 covers your link previews everywhere. That is the whole efficiency to be had.

The ones that refuse to share

A few placements have shapes that are theirs alone, and reusing something else gets it cropped badly:

• Facebook cover: 851 × 315. A 2.7:1 letterbox that matches nothing else, and it is cropped differently on mobile than on desktop — keep anything important well inside the middle.
• LinkedIn banner: 1584 × 396. Even wider at 4:1, and your profile photo covers the lower left of it.
• Twitch panel: 320 × 100. Tiny, and it is displayed at that size, so it is closer to a button than an image.
• Pinterest long pin: 1000 × 2100. A 1:2.1 column. Nothing else is that tall.
• Podcast artwork: 3000 × 3000. Square, but far larger than a social square, because it is also used as album art.

Profile pictures are all different and it barely matters

YouTube wants 800 × 800, X wants 400 × 400, Instagram 320 × 320, TikTok 200 × 200, Twitch 256 × 256. Every one is square and every one is displayed as a circle at a fraction of its upload size.

Export one square image at 800 × 800 with the subject comfortably inside a centred circle, and use it everywhere. Each platform will downscale it correctly. The only genuine rule is the circular mask: anything in the corners is invisible.

Crop is the part that actually costs you

The size is the easy half. What ruins images is the crop, and the failure is always the same: a 16:9 photograph pushed into a 9:16 frame keeps the middle third and discards two thirds of the width, along with whatever was in it.

Three ways to handle it, in order of how well they work:

1. Shoot or design wider than you need, keeping the subject centred and the edges expendable. This is the only approach that survives every crop.
2. Crop each one deliberately, choosing what to keep per platform. Best results, most work.
3. Centre-crop automatically and check the result. This is what the resize tools here do — scale to cover, then take the middle. It is right most of the time and obviously wrong when the subject is off to one side, which is why they show you the output.

What none of them should do is stretch. A squashed face reads as a mistake in a way that a tight crop never does.

Upload big, let them downscale

Every platform re-encodes what you upload. You cannot prevent that, but you can control what it starts from. Give it the recommended pixel dimensions at good quality and it downscales cleanly. Give it something already compressed to 40 KB and it compresses that again, and the artefacts compound.

The exception is the file size ceiling — YouTube's 2 MB thumbnail limit, for instance. Meet the ceiling by compressing once, carefully, not by shrinking the dimensions.

These change, so check the ones that matter

Every number here is correct as recorded and none of it is permanent. Platforms adjust sizes without announcements. If an image is expensive to redo — a banner, printed artwork, anything you cannot re-upload — confirm against the platform's own current help page before you commit. Everything else is worth a quick re-export if it ever looks off.