Nothing screams amateur hour quite like a profile photo with half your logo chopped off or a Facebook post where the entire message got cropped out. Yet brands keep making these mistakes because social media platforms love changing their image requirements.
The problem isn’t just aesthetic. Wrong image sizes directly impact how your content performs. People scroll past posts that look broken or unprofessional. Algorithms might even penalize content that doesn’t display properly.
Instagram Still Refuses to Make Things Simple
Instagram supports horizontal, vertical, and square images. Great, right? Not so fast. While your posts appear in their original orientation in the feed, everything gets cropped to vertical on your profile grid.
This creates a weird situation where you need to think about two different viewing contexts for every single image. If you care about your grid looking cohesive (and you probably should), you need to plan for that vertical crop.
Profile photos on Instagram display at 110 x 100 pixels, but the files are stored at 320 x 320 pixels. Upload something smaller and it’ll look pixelated. Oh, and despite being square files, they display as circles. Keep important elements centered or watch them disappear.
For Stories and Reels, Instagram recommends keeping about 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom, and 6% on each side free from text or logos. That’s a lot of dead space to work around when you’re trying to create engaging content.
X Wants to Be a Video Platform Now
X (formerly Twitter) has been pushing video hard with its new video tab. The recommended aspect ratio there is 9:16 with a minimum resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels.
For regular posts with images, stick to square or landscape formats. The 1:1 and 16:9 aspect ratios work best and won’t get mangled when people view them on different devices. The shift toward multimedia is obvious, and static images alone aren’t cutting it anymore on the platform.
Facebook Makes Everything Complicated
Facebook image sizes differ between desktop and mobile viewing. Since users bounce between both constantly, you need to optimize for the lowest common denominator or accept that your content will look different depending on where someone sees it.
This gets even messier when you consider business pages versus personal profiles, ads versus organic posts, and feed placement versus Stories. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here.
The general rule? Go with 1080 x 1350 pixels for vertical feed posts, 1080 x 1080 pixels for squares, and 1080 x 1920 pixels for full-screen formats. These dimensions work across most placements without looking too terrible anywhere.
LinkedIn Has Different Rules for Different Page Types
Just when you thought you had it figured out, LinkedIn switches things up between personal profiles and company pages. Because why would anything be consistent?
For feed images, 1200 x 1200 pixels is your safe bet. Link previews perform best at 1200 x 627 pixels. These dimensions work well enough across both personal and business contexts, though LinkedIn keeps tweaking things.
The professional network leans toward polished, high-quality visuals more than other platforms. A grainy or poorly cropped image stands out in a bad way when everyone else is posting sleek branded content.
Why Getting Dimensions Right Actually Matters
Using wrong image sizes leads to cropping, compression artifacts, and weird empty spaces around your visuals. Text gets cut off. Logos disappear. Calls to action become unreadable.
Beyond the obvious visual problems, engagement drops. People judge content quality within milliseconds of seeing it. A post that looks broken or amateurish gets scrolled past instantly.
Platform algorithms might also dock you for poor quality content. While the exact ranking factors are mysterious, platforms consistently prioritize content that looks good and performs well. Images that don’t display properly fail on both counts.
The Standard That Isn’t Really Standard
A width of 1080 pixels has become the most common baseline across platforms. The 4:5 and 9:16 aspect ratios work best on mobile-first platforms, which is basically everything now.
But “standard” is misleading because every platform still has its quirks. Instagram crops differently than Facebook. LinkedIn prefers different dimensions than X. What works perfectly on one network might look terrible on another.
This is where things get annoying for anyone managing business accounts across multiple platforms. You either create separate images for each network or accept some compromise in quality somewhere.
Tools Can Help But Aren’t Magic
Publishing platforms like Hootsuite let you resize images for different networks without leaving their interface. You pick your target platform from a dropdown and it optimizes automatically.
That’s convenient, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that platforms all want different things. An image optimized for Instagram’s vertical format won’t look great when resized for LinkedIn’s horizontal preference. Automatic tools can’t magically add content to fill empty space or reframe your composition.
The better approach is designing with multiple aspect ratios in mind from the start. Leave flexible space around key elements. Don’t put important text or graphics at the edges where they might get cropped. Think about how the image works both horizontal and vertical.
Keeping Up With Constant Changes
Social media image sizes change gradually, with small updates happening every year as platforms adjust their layouts. Following platform updates helps, but let’s be honest, nobody has time to monitor every minor specification change across six different networks.
Enterprises usually standardize by creating templates for approved aspect ratios and using shared tools to resize content. This keeps things consistent and makes production more efficient, even if it means some compromise in optimization for any single platform.
The alternative is creating fully custom images for every platform every time, which sounds great until you realize how much work that actually involves for a simple post.
The Real Cost of Wrong Dimensions
Getting image sizes wrong isn’t just an aesthetic issue. It signals to your audience that you don’t really understand the platform or care enough to get the details right.
That matters more than you’d think. People are incredibly sensitive to visual quality on social media. We’ve all been trained by years of polished branded content to expect things to look right. When something looks off, even if we can’t articulate exactly why, we notice.
Your competitors are probably getting their image dimensions right. That gives them an edge every single time your content looks cropped or stretched or pixelated in comparison.
Maybe the real question isn’t why image sizes matter, but why platforms can’t just agree on a universal standard that works everywhere.
