Social Media Aspect Ratio Guide 2026 — Every Platform, Every Format

Instagram splits into three shapes depending on placement:

The profile grid always forces a square crop regardless of what shape you originally posted, so if you post a 4:5 photo, check what the top and bottom edges look like once they're cropped away — that's what shows on your profile. The 4:5 guide covers the portrait feed format in more depth.

TikTok is built around one shape: 9:16, at 1080 × 1920 — see the 9:16 calculator for a size table. Content that isn't 9:16 gets pillarboxed (black bars on the sides) or, worse, auto-cropped in a way you don't control. If you're repurposing landscape footage for TikTok, don't just letterbox it — recompose the shot so the subject fills the vertical frame, or use a blurred or extended background fill instead of hard black bars.

TikTok's Safe Zone matters here too: the top 100–150px, the interface overlay on the right side (like, comment and share icons) and the bottom strip (caption, username) cover a meaningful chunk of the frame. Keep key subjects and any on-screen text inside the middle 80% of the frame vertically.

YouTube runs three different aspect ratios depending on content type:

• Standard uploads: 16:9, ideally at 1920 × 1080 or 3840 × 2160 for 4K
• Shorts: 9:16, at 1080 × 1920 — the same shape as TikTok and Reels
• Thumbnails: 16:9, at 1280 × 720 minimum — this is separate from the video itself and gets its own crop

A common mistake is exporting a video at 16:9 but designing the thumbnail as a screenshot from the video without checking that the important visual (a face, text, a product) survives the compression YouTube applies to thumbnails at small sizes in search results.

Facebook's feed behaves similarly to Instagram but is more forgiving of landscape:

• Feed image posts: 1.91:1 (1200 × 630) for link previews, 1:1 or 4:5 for native photo posts
• Facebook Stories: 9:16 (1080 × 1920)
• Video posts: 16:9 for landscape, 9:16 for vertical — Facebook auto-plays both correctly in-feed, unlike some competitors

LinkedIn favours landscape and near-square shapes because it's viewed heavily on desktop as well as mobile:

• Image posts: 1.91:1 (1200 × 627) is the standard link-preview shape
• Square posts (1:1) perform well on mobile feeds specifically
• Video: 16:9 for standard video, though LinkedIn also supports 9:16 for native vertical video uploads

Pinterest is the one major platform that rewards tall, non-standard ratios rather than punishing them. The platform's own guidance favours:

• Standard Pins: 2:3 (1000 × 1500)
• Idea Pins — Pinterest's Stories-style format: 9:16 (1080 × 1920)

Pins taller than 2:3 (like 1:2.1) get cut off in the main feed view, so while Pinterest tolerates unusual ratios better than other platforms, there's still a practical ceiling on how tall is too tall.

• In-feed image posts: 16:9 (1200 × 675) is what displays without cropping in most cases
• Header or banner image: 3:1 (1500 × 500)
• Profile photo: 1:1, displayed as a circle, so keep the subject centred away from the corners

The single most common error when adapting one piece of content across platforms is stretching instead of cropping. Stretching a 16:9 video to fit a 9:16 frame distorts every face and object in the shot — people look taller and narrower than they are. Cropping instead trims the sides or top and bottom of the original frame, which loses some content at the edges but keeps everything that remains looking correct.

If you're repurposing a single video or image across several of the platforms above, work out each target size first, then crop deliberately around your subject rather than letting an editing tool's default "fit to frame" setting stretch the file for you. A ratio calculator that shows you both the reduced ratio and the exact pixel dimensions for your target platform makes it straightforward to check a size before you export, rather than finding out after upload that a platform has cropped out something important.

Where to make that crop depends on the software you already use. The editing-tools guide gives the exact menu path in Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Canva and CapCut, including how each behaves when the ratio changes mid-project. If the same asset also has to work in print, shape is only half the problem — the DPI and resolution explainer covers the other half. And when you want the numbers rather than the principle, the aspect ratio converter costs out both the crop and the pad for whatever size you actually have.

1. Start from the largest master you have. Export the original at full resolution first. Never take one platform's export — say a 1080 × 1080 Instagram crop — and reuse it as the source for something larger, because you would be upscaling a file that has already been cropped.
2. List every target before you open an editor. Read the ratio and pixel size for each platform from the quick reference table above, so you crop once per target instead of guessing as you go.
3. Decide crop or pad for each target. Cropping keeps everything undistorted but throws away the edges; padding keeps the whole frame and fills the gap with bars. For social feeds, crop. For a cinematic look inside a wide player, pad.
4. Crop around the subject, not around the centre by default. Auto-centred crops cut off faces, logos and captions that sit off-centre. Keep anything important out of the outer ten per cent of the frame.
5. Respect the safe zones on vertical formats. Stories, Reels and Shorts overlay their own interface across the top and bottom of a 9:16 frame. Anything sitting inside those margins gets covered by the platform's own controls.
6. Export at the exact pixel size, then preview. Upload sizes are specified in pixels, not ratios. Exporting 1080 × 1350 rather than "roughly 4:5" is what stops a platform re-compressing or re-cropping your file on upload.

The pattern worth noticing is that every conversion to a taller shape costs you width when you start from a 16:9 master. Shooting in 9:16 gives you the vertical crop at full quality; converting into it hands you a third of the pixels you paid for. Run your own numbers through the aspect ratio converter before you commit to an export.

• 9:16 calculator
• 4:5 calculator
• 2:3 calculator
• Editing tools guide
• DPI vs resolution
• Monitor ratios compared

Want the numbers rather than the theory? The aspect ratio calculator reduces any width and height to its simplest ratio and shows the exact pixel size for a target shape.