Image Size Cheatsheet
Recommended dimensions for every format on the networks worth posting to — with each aspect ratio drawn to scale, because seeing 4:5 beside 9:16 settles it faster than reading the numbers.
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Feed — square
1080 × 1080
1:1
Feed — portrait
1080 × 1350
4:5
Takes the most vertical space in-feed.
Reels & Stories
1080 × 1920
9:16
Keep text clear of the top and bottom 250px.
Profile picture
320 × 320
1:1
The three ratios that cover most of it
9:16
1080 × 1920
Reels, Stories, Shorts, TikTok — every vertical video surface.
4:5
1080 × 1350
The most broadly useful still. Maximum feed height, crops acceptably to square.
16:9
1280 × 720
YouTube thumbnails, landscape video, link previews.
Exporting so it survives the upload
- 1
Design for the crop, not the canvas
Assume the worst crop your post could get — usually square — and keep anything that must survive inside that middle box. The rest is background you can afford to lose.
- 2
Keep text away from the edges
Between safe areas on Stories, thumbnail overlays on YouTube and the profile row on Reels, the outer band of any vertical image is contested space. Nothing you need read should sit there.
- 3
Export at the recommended size, then stop
A 4000px master helps nobody once the network has recompressed it. Export at the listed dimensions and you keep control of the quality instead of handing it to their encoder.
- 4
Check the thumbnail at thumbnail size
A YouTube thumbnail is judged at about 120px wide in a sidebar. If the text is unreadable shrunk to a fifth, it is unreadable where it counts.
Questions
- What happens if I upload the wrong size?
- The network crops or scales it, and you do not get to choose where. The usual casualties are text near an edge and faces at the top of a portrait image — both survive if you export at the recommended ratio instead.
- Should I always upload the largest size?
- Upload at the recommended dimensions rather than the largest you have. Every network recompresses on upload, and a needlessly huge file just gets compressed harder — which is where visible artefacting on text and flat colour comes from.
- Which single ratio works almost everywhere?
- 1080 × 1350 (4:5) is the most broadly useful still. It takes the most vertical space Instagram allows, crops acceptably to square, and is tall enough not to look lost on LinkedIn or Facebook. For anything vertical-video, 1080 × 1920 is the answer everywhere.
- Do these change?
- Occasionally, and usually at the margins rather than wholesale — 4:5 and 9:16 have been stable for years. When one does move it changes in a single place here and everywhere in Mediux follows.
- Why do Stories and Reels have a safe area?
- The interface sits on top of your image. Roughly the top 250 and bottom 250 pixels carry the profile row, caption and buttons, so anything important there is covered. Design to the middle and use the edges for background.
- Does Mediux resize for me?
- It handles per-channel crops when you attach an asset to a multi-channel post, so one upload goes out at the right ratio on each network rather than you exporting the same picture four times.
Want this built into your workflow instead of a one-off?