How to Resize Images for Social Media — All Platforms at Once

Every social platform has its own image dimensions. Instagram wants 1080×1080 squares. YouTube needs 1280×720 thumbnails. Facebook covers are 820×312. If you're posting the same visual across multiple platforms — a product launch photo, a blog promotion, a portfolio piece — you're either resizing manually five times or uploading the wrong size and letting the platform crop it unpredictably.

Scanly's Social Media Resizer takes one image and generates versions for every platform you select. Pick your sizes, choose Cover or Contain mode, download individually or grab all of them as a ZIP. Everything runs in your browser — the image never leaves your device. Try it free →

Resize for Social Media

Every Platform Size in One Reference

These are the recommended image dimensions for each platform as of 2026. They've been stable for years — platforms rarely change them because doing so would break millions of existing posts.

Instagram Post: 1080×1080 (1:1 square). The format that defined Instagram. Portrait posts at 1080×1350 also perform well in feeds because they take up more screen real estate, but the resizer targets the standard square since it's the universal safe choice.

Instagram Story / Reels: 1080×1920 (9:16 vertical). Full-screen content. Same dimensions as TikTok covers — one resize serves both platforms.

Instagram Landscape: 1080×566 (1.91:1). Less common but useful for panoramic shots or wide graphics. Instagram crops landscape images to this ratio in the feed.

Facebook Post: 1200×630 (1.91:1). Also the Open Graph standard — this is the image size that appears when someone shares a link on Facebook, LinkedIn, or most messaging apps. You can preview how your image will appear when shared using the OG Image Previewer.

Facebook Cover: 820×312 on desktop, but Facebook crops to 820×462 on mobile (showing more of the top and bottom). Design with the important content centered in the 820×312 safe zone.

X (Twitter) Post: 1200×675 (16:9). Twitter crops to this ratio in the timeline. Images uploaded at other ratios get center-cropped, which can cut off important elements like text or faces.

LinkedIn Post: 1200×627. Nearly identical to Facebook's post dimensions. If you're cross-posting, one image at 1200×630 works for both.

YouTube Thumbnail: 1280×720 (16:9). This is the most high-stakes image on the list — custom thumbnails are one of the biggest factors in click-through rate. YouTube compresses thumbnails heavily, so start with a high-quality source and keep text large enough to read at small sizes.

Pinterest Pin: 1000×1500 (2:3 vertical). Tall pins take up more space in the Pinterest feed, which directly correlates with engagement. The 2:3 ratio is optimal — taller than that and Pinterest may truncate the preview.

TikTok Cover: 1080×1920 (9:16). Same as Instagram Stories. The cover frame is what appears on your profile grid, so the content should look good as a still image even if the video is dynamic.

Cover vs. Contain — When to Crop, When to Fit

The resizer offers two fit modes, and choosing the right one matters more than most people realize.

Cover fills the entire frame edge-to-edge by scaling the image up and cropping the overflow. It centers the image, so you lose equal amounts from both sides (or top and bottom). This works well for photographs — cropping the edges of a landscape shot or portrait rarely damages the composition. It fails for images where the edges matter: screenshots with UI elements at the borders, infographics with text near the margins, or product photos where the full item needs to be visible.

Contain fits the entire image inside the frame without cropping anything, then fills the remaining space with a solid background color (white by default, customizable). This preserves every pixel of the original but adds letterbox bars — horizontal bars for landscape images in portrait frames, vertical bars for portrait images in landscape frames. Use Contain for screenshots, graphics with text, logos, and anything where cutting off content would be worse than having a border.

If you need more control over exactly which part of the image stays in frame, use the Image Cropper first to set the focal point, then run the cropped version through the resizer.

Optimizing Quality Before You Resize

Resizing amplifies existing quality problems. A slightly soft image at 4000×3000 becomes obviously blurry at 1080×1080. A JPEG with heavy compression artifacts looks worse after scaling. Preparing your source image before resizing saves time and produces better results.

Start with the largest, highest-quality version of the image you have. If you're working from a phone photo, use the original from your camera roll — not a version that was already shared and re-compressed through WhatsApp or Instagram. Use the Quality Analyzer to check the source image's technical quality before resizing.

iPhone photos often arrive as HEIC files, which some tools can't handle. Convert them first with the HEIC Converter — it produces a JPEG or PNG at full quality that every tool can work with.

After resizing, each platform will re-compress your image on upload. There's nothing you can do about that, but starting with a clean, properly sized image means the platform's compression starts from a better baseline. Instagram's compression is particularly aggressive on images that aren't at native resolution — uploading at exactly 1080×1080 produces noticeably better results than uploading a 4000×4000 image and letting Instagram downscale it.

Batch Workflow — One Image, All Platforms, ZIP Download

The typical cross-posting workflow: upload your image, check the boxes for every platform you need (they're all selected by default), pick Cover or Contain, choose JPEG or PNG output, and hit Generate. The tool processes each size sequentially and shows a preview of every version. Download them one at a time, or grab the ZIP file that contains all of them — each file named with its platform and dimensions (ig-post-1080x1080.jpg, yt-thumb-1280x720.jpg, etc.).

JPEG output is best for photographs — smaller files, no visible quality difference. PNG is better for graphics with text, sharp edges, or flat colors, where JPEG compression creates visible artifacts around high-contrast boundaries. If your image has a transparent background, save as PNG — JPEG doesn't support transparency and will fill the alpha channel with white. See our transparent background guide for more on this.

What the Resizer Doesn't Do (and What Else You Might Need)

The Social Media Resizer handles dimensions. It doesn't add text overlays, apply filters, adjust colors, or create collage layouts. If you need those:

Image Filters adjusts brightness, contrast, saturation, and warmth — useful for giving all your platform versions a consistent look before uploading. Image Compressor reduces file size if you need to email the images or upload them to a platform with strict file size limits. Image Watermark adds a text or image watermark — useful for portfolio images being shared across platforms where you want credit attribution.

If you need custom dimensions that aren't in the preset list — say, a specific banner for a Substack newsletter or an email header — the general-purpose Image Resizer accepts any pixel dimensions and supports scaling by percentage.

The Right Size for Every Feed

Social media platforms are unforgiving about image dimensions. Upload the wrong size and you get unexpected cropping, blurry scaling, or white bars that scream "this person doesn't know what they're doing." The Social Media Resizer eliminates the guesswork — one upload, every platform, exact dimensions, two seconds. The ZIP download means you're not sitting there downloading and renaming ten individual files.

For a broader look at all platform requirements with tips on safe zones, text placement, and compression behavior, read the complete social media image sizes reference.