Every social platform recompresses whatever you upload — aggressively. Upload the wrong size and the platform scales it, crops it and squeezes it until it looks soft. Upload the right size at the right quality and their encoder has an easy job, so your image survives looking sharp. Here are the dimensions that work in 2026, and the settings to use before you upload.
- Feed post (square): 1080 × 1080 px. Instagram stores at 1080 wide — anything bigger is downscaled.
- Feed post (portrait): 1080 × 1350 px (4:5). Takes up the most screen space in the feed.
- Stories / Reels cover: 1080 × 1920 px (9:16). Keep text away from the top and bottom 250 px, where the UI overlays sit.
Export at JPEG/WebP quality 80. Instagram's recompression is brutal on fine texture; starting from a clean 80-quality file beats starting from a 100-quality one that's four times larger — the result after their encoder looks identical.
- Feed image: 1200 × 630 px for links, up to 2048 px wide for photo posts.
- Cover photo: 820 × 312 px (displays 640 × 360 on mobile — keep critical content centered).
Facebook compresses hard. Photos with text (posters, infographics) survive better as PNG under 1 MB — Facebook skips some recompression for smaller PNGs.
X (Twitter)
- In-stream image: 1200 × 675 px (16:9) displays without cropping.
- Header: 1500 × 500 px.
X keeps JPEGs under 5 MB largely intact if they're already efficiently encoded — quality 80 at the right dimensions usually passes through untouched.
- Shared image / link preview: 1200 × 627 px.
- Company banner: 1128 × 191 px.
YouTube
- Thumbnail: 1280 × 720 px, under 2 MB. This is the one place where maximum quality matters — thumbnails drive clicks, so use quality 85–90.
- Channel art: 2560 × 1440 px, with the safe area for all devices being the central 1546 × 423 px.
- Standard pin: 1000 × 1500 px (2:3). Taller pins get cut off in the feed.
The universal workflow
- Resize to the platform's target dimensions before uploading — never let the platform do the scaling.
- Export at JPEG or WebP quality 80 (85–90 only for YouTube thumbnails).
- Keep a master copy at full resolution; derive each platform's version from the master, not from another platform's export.
Batch tools make this painless: drop the same photo in once per size preset and download the set. Ten minutes of prep means your images look intentional on every platform instead of "uploaded and hoped".
Compress your images now
Ready to put this into practice? Use the free WebPcompress compressor — it runs entirely in your browser, handles 20 images at a time, and your photos never leave your device.