Social Media Image & Video Sizes: What Each Platform Actually Documents

Because most of them are copying each other rather than the platforms. Very few of the numbers in a typical "2026 social media image sizes" chart appear anywhere in official documentation. Some were accurate three years ago, some were inferred by measuring screenshots, and some appear to be guesses that got repeated until they looked authoritative.

This page is organised the other way round. Everything below is either taken from the platform's own developer or business documentation and linked at the bottom, or explicitly flagged as unverified. Where a platform simply does not publish a number, we say so instead of filling the gap — because a wrong spec costs you a cropped logo or an unreadable caption on every post you make.

Instagram's own developer documentation is the most precise public source, and it defines feed images by aspect-ratio range rather than by fixed pixel sizes: anything between 4:5 (portrait) and 1.91:1 (landscape) is accepted, with an image width between 320 and 1440 pixels.

The practical consequence is that 4:5 is the tallest image Instagram will take without cropping — which also makes it the ratio that occupies the most vertical space in the feed. 1080 × 1350 is the standard way to hit that.

You may have read that Instagram now wants 3:4 for the feed. Be careful with that advice: 3:4 is taller than 4:5, and Instagram's documented range does not accept it. We could not find official confirmation of a 3:4 feed format, and the API contradicts it, so we would not design a whole content library around it yet.

TikTok publishes precise specs for advertising formats and much less for organic posting, so the figures below come from its ads documentation. They describe what the platform accepts, which is the part that matters when you are producing an asset.

Note that TikTok publishes minimums, not recommendations, for resolution. The 1080 × 1920 figure you see everywhere is not a TikTok number — it is a sensible convention (it is simply 9:16 at 1080p), but it is not something TikTok documents.

Pinterest is the most straightforward of the three, and the only one that states a single recommended pixel size outright in its creative guidance.

Worth knowing: Pinterest describes taller ratios as liable to be cut off in the feed, not as penalised. There is no claim anywhere in Pinterest's guidance that an unusual ratio is downranked — the risk is purely that your image gets cropped where you did not intend.

We are not listing Facebook dimensions here, because we could not verify a single one against Meta's own documentation — its business help pages are not machine-readable, and every figure in circulation traces back to third-party blogs rather than to Meta.

That is not the same as saying those numbers are wrong. It means we cannot stand behind them, and neither should any guide that presents them as official without having checked. Meta's Business Help Center is the source of truth; it is linked at the bottom of this page.

In practice, an asset built to Instagram's feed range will behave sensibly on Facebook, since both run on Meta's ad infrastructure and share aspect-ratio handling.

This is the most useful question in short-form video and the worst documented. Captions, the username, the sound label, and the action buttons all sit on top of your frame, and none of TikTok, Instagram or YouTube publishes numeric safe-zone margins.

Third-party safe-zone charts exist, but they disagree materially. Two widely-shared 2025–2026 guides differ by 160 pixels on TikTok's bottom margin alone — around 15% of the frame height. Neither explains how it measured. Averaging them would produce a number with no basis at all.

So treat the following as a conservative estimate rather than a spec: on a 1080 × 1920 frame, keep anything that must stay readable — product name, price, call to action — inside roughly the central 900 × 1200 area, leaving about 20% clear at the top and 25% at the bottom. If you need precision, TikTok distributes downloadable safe-zone template files, and measuring those directly is the only reliable method available.

If the asset has to be posted in more than one place, 1:1 is the safest single choice: it sits comfortably inside Instagram's accepted feed range, is an accepted TikTok video ratio, and crops predictably almost everywhere else.

If you can produce two, make the second one 9:16. Between them, a square and a vertical cover the feed and the full-screen surfaces on every platform on this page, which is most of what a small brand actually needs.

Generating each format separately beats cropping one master asset. A crop moves your product off the composition it was staged for; regenerating keeps the product framed correctly for the shape it will actually be seen in.