Every size, and why
27 sizes that something actually demands, each with the reason it is that number — the crop LinkedIn hides behind your avatar, the 2MB cap YouTube rejects thumbnails for, the DPI a print shop needs. Pick one and crop it on your own device.
Social profiles and posts
- Instagram square post (1080 × 1080) Instagram re-encodes everything you upload. Sending anything wider than 1080px gains nothing and just gives their compressor more to throw away.
- Instagram portrait post (1080 × 1350) 4:5 is the tallest shape Instagram allows in the feed, so it occupies the most screen on a phone. Anything taller gets cropped to it.
- Instagram story / reel (1080 × 1920) The top and bottom ~250px sit under the profile row and the reply bar. Keep text out of those bands or the interface will cover it.
- LinkedIn personal banner (1584 × 396) Your profile photo covers the bottom-left corner on desktop, and mobile crops the sides. Keep anything that matters in the upper-right two-thirds.
- LinkedIn company cover (1128 × 191) Company pages use a much shallower banner than personal profiles, and reusing a personal 1584 × 396 image here crops the top and bottom off.
- X / Twitter header (1500 × 500) Your avatar overlaps the lower-left corner, and the header is cropped shorter on mobile. The safe area is the middle horizontal band.
- Facebook cover (851 × 315) Desktop shows 851 × 315; mobile shows a narrower, taller crop from the centre. Anything near the left or right edge is invisible on a phone.
- YouTube thumbnail (1280 × 720) YouTube rejects thumbnails over 2MB, which is the single most common upload failure. This preset targets that limit as well as the size.
- Pinterest pin (1000 × 1500) 2:3 is the shape Pinterest shows without truncating. Taller pins get cut off in the feed, and shorter ones take less vertical space than competitors.
- Discord profile banner (960 × 540) Discord shows only the top portion of the banner in the compact profile popout, so put the subject high in the frame.
Work and professional
- CV / résumé photo (35 × 45 mm) The same 35 × 45 mm shape as a European passport photo, at 300 DPI so it prints correctly if the CV is ever put on paper.
- Zoom / Teams background (1920 × 1080) Both apps mirror your background by default, so text in the image reads backwards to you but correctly to everyone else. Do not flip it to "fix" that.
- Email signature logo (300 × 100) Outlook ignores CSS sizing on images in signatures, so the file itself must be the display size. PNG because most signature logos need transparency.
- Slack avatar (512 × 512) Slack crops avatars to a rounded square, so anything in the extreme corners is clipped. 512px covers every place Slack displays it.
Selling online
- Amazon product image (2000 × 2000) Amazon only enables hover-zoom above 1000px on the longest side, and recommends 1600px+. Listings without zoom convert measurably worse.
- Etsy listing image (2000 × 2000) Etsy displays listing thumbnails as squares but the first image in a 4:3 shape, so a square upload is cropped top and bottom in the gallery view.
- eBay listing photo (1600 × 1600) eBay requires at least 500px on the longest side and only enables zoom at 800px+. 1600 gives zoom headroom without hitting the 12MB per-photo cap.
- Shopify product image (2048 × 2048) Shopify generates every smaller size from what you upload, so the upload is the quality ceiling for the entire storefront. 2048 is their recommended square.
Websites and apps
- Open Graph / link preview (1200 × 630) WhatsApp will not fetch a preview image over 300KB, so a beautiful 2MB card silently shows no image at all in the app most links get shared in.
- Favicon source (512 × 512) One 512px PNG in the web manifest covers every modern browser. For the full icon set including a real .ico, use the favicon generator instead.
- Apple touch icon (180 × 180) iOS adds its own rounded corners and does not honour transparency — a transparent icon gets a black background on the home screen. Use a solid one.
- Website hero image (1920px WebP) Hero images are almost always the Largest Contentful Paint element, so their weight sets your Core Web Vitals score more than anything else on the page.
Printing
- Photo print 6 × 4 inch (300 DPI) Print shops need 300 DPI, which for a 6 × 4 print means 1800 × 1200 pixels. BriskFile writes the resolution into the file, which most browser tools drop.
- Photo print 7 × 5 inch (300 DPI) 7 × 5 is a 7:5 ratio, not the 3:2 of a standard camera frame, so something has to be cropped. Choose what, rather than letting the lab choose.
- A4 page at 300 DPI (2480 × 3508) A4 is 210 × 297 mm, which is 2480 × 3508 pixels at 300 DPI. This is the size print shops mean when they ask for "full page, print resolution".
Screens and wallpapers
- Desktop wallpaper 4K (3840 × 2160) Cropping to 16:9 yourself stops Windows and macOS choosing their own crop, which usually cuts off the part you wanted to see.
- Phone wallpaper (1170 × 2532) Phone wallpapers are cropped further by the parallax effect, so the visible area is narrower than the file. Keep the subject away from the edges.
Down to a size limit
When the requirement is a number of kilobytes rather than a number of pixels. Fewer pixels beats lower quality at these sizes, which is why these sit here rather than under compression.
- Resize an image to 50KB Drop an image and it comes back under 50KB, reduced in size first so the result still reads properly.
- Resize an image to 100KB Drop an image and it comes back under 100KB, at the largest sensible size that fits.
Why these pages exist
Every one of these dimensions is on a hundred other websites. What is usually missing is the reason — that Facebook shows a different crop on mobile, that Amazon only turns on hover-zoom above 1000px, that a print shop needs the resolution written into the file and not just the right pixel count.
That is the part that stops you re-uploading three times, and it is the only reason a page here deserves to exist.