Facebook Image Sizes: The Complete 2026 Guide

You spent forty minutes making a gorgeous cover photo. You upload it, and Facebook chews off the left third, blurs your logo, and shoves your tagline behind a profile picture. Sound familiar? You didn’t do anything wrong. You just ran into the single most quietly frustrating thing about designing for Facebook: it has a different ideal size for basically every single slot, and it will happily stretch, squish, or crop anything that doesn’t match.

Here’s the good news. Once you know the right Facebook image sizes for each placement, and the handful of design rules that keep your art safe from Facebook’s cropping algorithm, you never have to guess again. You upload once, it looks crisp everywhere, and you get back the forty minutes you would’ve spent re-exporting. This guide is your one-stop reference. Bookmark it, because you’ll come back.

Why Facebook image sizes matter more than you think

Facebook compresses images aggressively. When you upload a photo that’s the wrong dimensions or a smaller resolution than the slot needs, Facebook scales it to fit, and scaling plus compression is where the mush happens. Text goes fuzzy, gradients get banded, and your carefully-kerned headline turns into a smudge. Upload the right dimensions at good resolution, and Facebook has far less work to do, so your art survives the trip.

The other reason sizing matters is cropping. Facebook shows the same image at different aspect ratios depending on the surface, a feed on desktop, a feed on a phone, a thumbnail in a share preview. If your subject is jammed against an edge, one of those crops will decapitate it. Designing to the right ratio, with a safe zone in the middle, is how you make sure the important part is always visible.

A quick, load-bearing caveat before we dive in: Facebook changes these specs regularly, sometimes quietly. The numbers below reflect commonly-documented current recommendations, and they’re a reliable starting point, but always sanity-check against what you actually see on your own page after uploading, and glance at Facebook’s official Help Center or Business Help when a placement really matters. Treat this as a map, not a contract.

The universal rule: design big, keep it simple

Before the specifics, internalize two habits that make every other rule easier.

Upload at the recommended size or a clean multiple of it. If a slot wants 1200 x 630 pixels, give it exactly that, or 2400 x 1260 if you want extra sharpness on high-density screens. Don’t upload a tiny 600-pixel-wide image and hope Facebook enlarges it nicely, because it won’t. Bigger source, cleaner result.

Keep critical elements, text, faces, logos, away from the edges. Facebook’s cropping is unpredictable across devices. If your logo lives in the corner, assume it will eventually get cut. Center what matters and leave breathing room. We’ll get into exact safe zones for the trickier placements below.

Profile picture

Your profile picture is the tiny circle that follows you everywhere, on your posts, your comments, your page header. Facebook stores it as a square and then displays it inside a circle, so the corners get clipped.

• Recommended upload size: at least 320 x 320 pixels; many people upload larger squares like 500 x 500 or 1000 x 1000 for future-proofing and sharpness.
• Display shape: circular crop, so keep your face or logo centered and don’t let anything important touch the corners.
• Minimum: Facebook generally requires profile photos to be at least 180 pixels wide, but going bigger always looks better.

Because the image renders so small in most places, simplicity wins. A single face filling the frame, or a clean logo mark with a bit of padding, reads far better than a busy scene that becomes an unrecognizable speck at thumbnail size.

Cover photo

The cover photo is the wide banner across the top of a profile or page, and it’s the single most cropped image on all of Facebook, because it displays at different dimensions on desktop versus mobile.

• Recommended upload size: 851 x 315 pixels for the classic display, though uploading larger at the same roughly 2.7:1 ratio (for example 1640 x 606 or higher) gives you sharper results.
• Mobile reality: on phones the cover is cropped taller and narrower than on desktop, so the far left and right edges get shaved off on mobile, and the top and bottom can get shaved on desktop.
• Safe zone: keep text and key visuals in the central area, roughly the middle 60 to 70 percent, so they survive both crops.

The classic mistake is putting your tagline in the bottom-left corner, exactly where your profile picture overlaps on desktop and where mobile crops the hardest. Center your message, or place it in the middle-right where the profile photo won’t cover it, and preview on both a desktop and a phone before you call it done.

Shared image posts (in-feed photos)

This is the workhorse, the plain photo or graphic you post to your feed. Facebook is fairly flexible here, but it favors certain ratios and will letterbox or crop the rest.

• Square: 1080 x 1080 pixels (1:1). A safe, reliable choice that displays fully on both desktop and mobile.
• Portrait: around 1080 x 1350 pixels (4:5). Portrait takes up more vertical space in the mobile feed, which means more screen real estate for your content, so many creators favor it.
• Landscape: around 1200 x 630 pixels (roughly 1.91:1) works well and matches the link-preview ratio, which keeps things consistent.

If you post the same graphic across several networks, square is the most portable ratio because it behaves predictably nearly everywhere. When you want maximum thumb-stopping presence in the Facebook feed specifically, portrait 4:5 is the move. Just avoid anything taller than 4:5, because Facebook will crop very tall images in the feed and force people to tap to see the whole thing.

Link and shared-link images

When you paste a URL and Facebook pulls in a preview card with a big image, that image comes from the page’s Open Graph tags, and its ideal size is the landscape link ratio.

• Recommended size: 1200 x 630 pixels (about 1.91:1).
• Minimum for a large preview: images below roughly 600 x 315 may render as a small square thumbnail instead of the large, clickable banner.

If you run a website or blog, this is the one to get right, because it controls how every one of your links looks when anyone shares it. Set your Open Graph image to 1200 x 630, keep text away from the extreme edges, and your links will show a clean, full-width preview instead of a sad little thumbnail. A scheduling tool that lets you preview the link card before it goes out saves you from finding out the hard way.

Facebook Stories

Stories are the vertical, full-screen, disappear-in-24-hours format. Because they fill the entire phone screen, they use a tall 9:16 ratio, and they have interface elements layered on top that you must design around.

• Recommended size: 1080 x 1920 pixels (9:16).
• Safe zone: keep essential text and graphics away from the top and bottom. Roughly the top 250 pixels and bottom 250 pixels get crowded by your profile icon, the close button, and the reply/reaction bar. Design your key message into the middle band.

The number-one Stories mistake is centering your call-to-action at the very bottom, right where the interface buttons live, so nobody can read it. Pull it up into the safe middle. If your Story is a repurposed feed graphic, add generous top and bottom padding so nothing important lands in the danger zones.

Facebook Reels

Reels are Facebook’s short vertical videos, and while the video itself is the star, the cover or thumbnail frame is an image you should treat with care, because it’s what people see before they tap play and it appears in your Reels tab as a grid.

• Video and cover size: 1080 x 1920 pixels (9:16), full vertical.
• Grid-crop awareness: in the Reels grid on your profile, the thumbnail is cropped to a taller, narrower shape, so keep your cover’s focal point and any text centered rather than at the top or bottom.
• Interface overlap: like Stories, captions, the audio label, and action buttons sit along the bottom and right edge of a playing Reel, so keep on-screen text clear of those areas.

Design your cover frame so it reads well both full-screen and as a small grid thumbnail. A clear focal point in the center, high contrast, and minimal text is the reliable recipe. For more on planning short vertical video, our guide to Reels ideas transfers almost perfectly to Facebook.

Event cover image

When you create a Facebook event, the header image is the first thing people see, and it sets the tone before they read a single word.

• Recommended size: 1200 x 628 pixels (roughly the same 1.91:1 landscape ratio as link previews).
• Cross-surface crops: the event image shows up in the feed, on the event page, and in share previews, each of which can crop slightly differently, so center your title and date.

Include the essentials, event name, date, maybe a location, but keep them centered and large enough to read on a phone. Don’t rely on tiny text in a corner, because it’ll get cropped or become illegible at thumbnail scale.

Group cover image

Facebook Groups have their own banner at the top of the group page, and it displays wider and shorter than a personal cover photo, with its own crop behavior across devices.

• Recommended size: 1640 x 856 pixels is a commonly cited spec that gives a clean result; the display ratio lands near 1.91:1.
• Safe zone: as with every banner, the top and bottom edges and the far sides can get trimmed on different screens, so keep the group name and any key art centered.

If you manage a community, a clear, welcoming group banner does real work, it signals what the group is about at a glance. Keep it simple, on-brand, and readable, and re-check it on mobile after uploading, since group banners crop noticeably on phones.

Facebook ad image sizes

Ads are where sizing gets strict, because a poorly-sized ad image can look unprofessional or get rejected outright, and because ads run across multiple placements, feed, Stories, Reels, right column, each with its own ideal ratio. Here are the commonly-documented recommended dimensions for the main formats.

• Single image feed ad: 1080 x 1080 pixels (1:1) or 1200 x 628 pixels (1.91:1) are the standard choices; square tends to hold more feed space on mobile.
• Stories and Reels ads: 1080 x 1920 pixels (9:16), full vertical, with the same top/bottom safe-zone discipline as organic Stories.
• Carousel ad cards: 1080 x 1080 pixels (1:1) per card, so every card in the carousel matches.
• Right-column ad (desktop): around 1200 x 628 pixels, displayed small, so keep it clean and text-light.

Two extra rules apply specifically to ads. First, keep text overlay minimal; historically Facebook discouraged heavy text on ad images, and a text-light design simply performs and displays better regardless of policy specifics. Second, provide the highest-resolution source you can within the size guidelines, because ads get scrutinized more closely than organic posts. When in doubt, check the current requirements inside Facebook’s Ads Manager, which shows the exact specs for whatever placement you’ve selected.

A cheat-sheet you can screenshot

Here’s the whole set of core Facebook image sizes in one glance, so you don’t have to scroll back up mid-project.

• Profile picture: 320 x 320+ (square, circular crop)
• Cover photo: 851 x 315 (or larger at 2.7:1)
• Square feed post: 1080 x 1080 (1:1)
• Portrait feed post: 1080 x 1350 (4:5)
• Landscape / link post: 1200 x 630 (1.91:1)
• Stories: 1080 x 1920 (9:16)
• Reels: 1080 x 1920 (9:16)
• Event cover: 1200 x 628
• Group cover: 1640 x 856
• Feed ad: 1080 x 1080 or 1200 x 628
• Stories/Reels ad: 1080 x 1920

Design and safe-zone tips that save you from re-uploading

Getting the pixel dimensions right is half the battle. These habits handle the other half.

Build to the ratio, then place your subject in the center third

For any image that appears on multiple surfaces, a cover, an event, a link card, imagine a box covering the middle 60 to 70 percent of the frame and keep everything essential inside it. The outer edges are Facebook’s playground; don’t put anything you can’t afford to lose out there.

Export at 2x for retina screens

If a slot wants 1080 pixels wide, exporting at 2160 wide and letting Facebook scale it down produces noticeably crisper text and edges on high-density phone displays. Just watch your file size, because enormous files can get compressed harder; aim for a sensible balance.

Use PNG for graphics with text, JPG for photos

Flat graphics, logos, and anything with crisp text hold up better as PNG, which avoids the fuzzy artifacts JPG compression adds around hard edges. Photographs with lots of gradients compress more gracefully as high-quality JPG. Matching the format to the content reduces the visible damage Facebook’s own compression does on top.

Preview on both desktop and mobile before you commit

Never trust the upload preview alone. View the finished post or profile on an actual phone and an actual desktop, because the crops differ and the phone is where most of your audience lives. Two minutes of previewing beats an hour of re-designing after someone points out your logo is cut in half.

Keep a master template for each slot

Set up a canvas at each recommended size in your design tool of choice, with the safe zone marked as a guide layer, and reuse it. You’ll never guess dimensions again, your branding stays consistent, and new graphics take a fraction of the time. This is the same batch-and-template thinking behind a good social media calendar, work once, reuse forever.

How this fits into an actual posting workflow

Correct sizing is a means to an end: content that looks sharp and goes out on time without a last-minute scramble. The workflow that makes that happen looks like this. Design in templates sized to the slots above, so nothing gets cropped. Batch your graphics for the week or month in one sitting. Then schedule everything in advance so you’re not fighting Facebook’s uploader at 8:47 in the morning with a blank caption and a mis-sized banner.

That last step is where a scheduling tool earns its keep. Being able to preview exactly how a post, link card, or Story will render, across every network you publish to, before it goes live, catches sizing problems while they’re still fixable. If you want a deeper primer on the scheduling side, our walkthrough on how to schedule social media posts pairs perfectly with this sizing guide.

Common mistakes to stop making today

• Uploading one image for every slot. A single graphic can’t be ideal for a square feed post, a tall Story, and a wide cover at once. Resize for each, or at minimum crop thoughtfully with the safe zone in mind.
• Putting text in the corners. The corners are the first thing Facebook crops. Center your message.
• Ignoring the mobile crop. Most of your audience is on a phone, and phone crops are the harshest, especially for covers and group banners. Preview on mobile, always.
• Using low-resolution source files. Facebook can only compress; it can’t invent detail. Feed it a high-quality, correctly-sized original.
• Never re-checking the specs. Facebook updates dimensions and interface elements over time. Re-verify the numbers for any high-stakes placement.

One more mindset shift worth making: think of Facebook image sizes as a system, not a list of trivia. Every placement is really just one of a few underlying ratios, square (1:1), portrait (4:5), landscape (1.91:1), and vertical (9:16). Once you recognize which ratio a slot uses, you already know how to design for it, and the specific pixel numbers become a quick lookup rather than something to memorize. That’s why the cheat-sheet above is grouped the way it is, and why building a template per ratio pays off so fast.

It also helps to remember that Facebook image sizes are shared DNA with other placements you already understand. The link-preview ratio (1200 x 630) is the same landscape shape as an event cover and a feed ad, so a template you make for one nearly works for the others. The 9:16 vertical you use for Stories is the identical canvas you’ll use for Reels and vertical ads. Learn the four ratios and you’ve effectively learned every Facebook image size that matters.

Sizing images for Facebook feels fiddly right up until you have the numbers memorized and a set of templates ready to go. After that, it’s the easiest part of your whole workflow. Save this page, build your templates, and let the crop-anxiety go, your art is going to show up exactly the way you designed it.