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Published dimension charts go out of date within months. What does not change is the underlying principle: every platform crops your image differently depending on where it appears, so design to the region that is always visible rather than to the canvas.
The safe-area principle
A YouTube banner is displayed at one size on a television, another on desktop and a third on a phone, cropping progressively tighter. Only the central region survives all three. The same logic applies to Facebook covers overlapped by a profile picture, LinkedIn banners cropped on mobile, and Instagram feed previews that show a square crop of a portrait post.
Design the essential content — name, offer, face — into the guaranteed centre. Treat everything outside it as decoration that may be cut.
Current working sizes
| Profile picture (all platforms) | 1000 × 1000 minimum, square. Assume a circular crop, so keep content away from the corners. |
|---|---|
| Instagram feed | 1080 × 1350 portrait is the largest feed footprint. Keep key content inside the central square for grid preview. |
| Stories and Reels | 1080 × 1920. Keep text out of the top and bottom 250 pixels where the interface sits. |
| Facebook cover | 1200 × 630 works across placements; expect the lower left to be overlapped on desktop. |
| LinkedIn banner | 1584 × 396, with the left portion overlapped by the profile photo on desktop. |
| YouTube banner | 2560 × 1440 canvas with a 1546 × 423 central safe area. Only the safe area is guaranteed visible. |
| YouTube thumbnail | 1280 × 720, under 2 MB. Design and check it at 210 pixels wide, which is closer to how it is seen. |
| X / Twitter post image | 1200 × 675 for landscape. Avoid critical content at the very edges. |
| Open Graph link preview | 1200 × 630. This is what appears when your page is shared anywhere. |
Practical rules that outlive the specs
- Design one master at the largest ratio and crop down, rather than designing each size separately.
- Check every crop before publishing, on an actual phone as well as desktop.
- Keep text large. Feed images are viewed at a fraction of their exported size.
- Do not put essential information in a corner. Every platform crops corners somewhere.
- Export at the platform size rather than uploading oversized files — platform compression is harsher on larger uploads.
- For anything with text, check legibility at 25% zoom. If it fails there it fails in the feed.
Do not forget Open Graph
The image that appears when someone shares your page on any platform comes from your Open Graph tags, not from the page content. A site without them shows a random image or none at all, which measurably reduces click-through on shared links. Set a 1200 × 630 image, a title and a description on every page, and test with each platform's debugging tool — they cache aggressively, and a fix often needs a manual re-scrape.
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