Social Media Image Sizes 2026 — The Complete Chart (IG, YouTube, X, LinkedIn)

Wrong image sizes don't just look sloppy — they cost reach. A landscape post gets a fraction of the feed height a portrait post gets. A Reel cover with the title near the top gets decapitated on your grid. A YouTube thumbnail designed at desktop size turns to soup at the 168-pixel width most people actually see it at. Here's the complete 2026 chart, the traps inside each placement, and the free resizer that outputs all of them from one upload.

The 2026 size chart

• Instagram post (portrait): 1080 × 1350 (4:5). The default. Portrait occupies ~30% more screen than square and nearly double a landscape post. If you only remember one size, it's this one.
• Instagram post (square): 1080 × 1080 (1:1). Still fully supported; the tidy-grid option.
• Instagram Story / Reel: 1080 × 1920 (9:16). Full-bleed, but the top ~250px (username, camera) and bottom ~250px (reply bar, CTA) are covered by UI. Text in those bands is unreadable at the moment it matters.
• Reel cover: 1080 × 1920 — but see the trap below.
• YouTube thumbnail: 1280 × 720 (16:9), under 2MB. Design test: shrink it to 168px wide — if the text isn't readable there, it isn't readable where clicks happen.
• X (Twitter) header: 1500 × 500 (3:1). The profile photo overlaps the bottom-left; keep anything important out of that corner.
• LinkedIn banner: 1584 × 396 (4:1). Mobile crops the sides hard — center the subject.
• Link preview image (og:image): 1200 × 630 (1.91:1), under ~600KB. This is the one that renders when your URL is shared in WhatsApp or DMs — details in the link preview fix guide.

The Reel cover trap (the one everyone hits)

You export a beautiful 1080 × 1920 cover, set it on the Reel, and your profile grid shows a headless torso where the title used to be. That's because the grid doesn't display the full cover — it shows a center-cropped 3:4 region. Roughly the top and bottom fifths of your cover simply don't exist on the grid.

The fix is mechanical: put faces and title text inside the middle 3:4 zone. The resizer's Reel-cover preset draws that guide box on the preview so you can nudge the crop until everything important sits inside it.

JPG or PNG (and why your uploads look worse than your exports)

Every platform recompresses what you upload. You can't opt out — you can only hand it a file that survives recompression well:

• Photos → JPG at ~90%. Bigger quality settings just give the platform more to throw away; lower ones stack your artifacts under theirs.
• Text, screenshots, flat graphics → PNG. JPG smears sharp edges; the compression halo around text is the tell of a resized-wrong post.
• Never upscale. If the source is smaller than the target, no exporter can invent the missing pixels. Shoot or design at the largest size you need, then downscale.
• Downscale in steps. A single 6000px → 1080px jump softens detail; halving repeatedly keeps edges. (The free resizer does this automatically.)

One upload, seven files

The practical workflow: export your master image once at full resolution, drop it into the image resizer, nudge the crop so the subject sits right in every aspect ratio, and download all seven placements — exact pixels, named by platform, processed entirely in your browser so nothing uploads anywhere.

And once the post looks right everywhere, make sure the profile it points back to converts: a free link-in-bio page with your products and lead magnets is the other half of the loop.