One of the things that you’ll hear most from readers of blogs is that they like nice, big, clear images. However it can be confusing to know how big an image needs to be. We’ve rounded up the most popular places that you’ll upload images to.
We still use PicMonkey for all of our image editing needs – it’s free and easy to use for what we need, so why use anything else? To crop an image to a specific size in PicMonkey, open the file you’re going to edit, then click “Crop” in the Basic Edits section. In the “actual size” section, type in the specific figures (as listed below) and click the “Scale Photo” box. If you then want to adjust where the crop is, or how much of the image should be included, you can adjust the highlighted rectangle on the image (just don’t size it smaller than the highlighted box that appears otherwise the resolution will be awful!)
The figures shown below are correct as of the publishing of this post
Blog
Let’s start with a difficult one! Everyone’s blog layout will be different, and what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. However, you want to get the sweet spot between providing clear images that don’t take a few years to load!
Keeping images to a 12:9 ratio seems to work best for most blogs – sizing wise, that’s 1200 x 900 px.
Your profile picture is a square which may be cropped into a circle – the minimum sizing recommended by Twitter is 400 x 400.
The header photo on your profile page should be at least 1500 x 500.
Your profile page will be cropped into a square image, and will show as 170 x 170 on a desktop (scaling down for tablets and phones). When you’re posting comments as the page, it will be cropped into a circle.
The cover image on your Page will display as 820 x 312 on a desktop, again scaling down for smartphones etc.
If your images use text, save them as a PNG file rather than JPG – they will look much better!
The first thing you’ll need to think about with Instagram images is whether you want to have all square sized images, or if you don’t mind mixing landscape, portrait and square images in your feed. Some people like to plan out their feed to specific types of images which will obviously affect the sizing!
The width edge of your image should be at least 1080 pixels – other than that, the ratio is up to you.
Stories are always in portrait and should be at least 900 x 1600
Your profile picture on Instagram will always be a square image which will be cropped into a circle so that’s an important thing to consider when choosing a profile picture.
YouTube
For your channel header, your image should be 2560 x 1440. Your icon/profile picture will look best if you consider that the image will be turned into a circle occasionally and should be 800 x 800.
Your videos will look best with an aspect of 16:9 or with dimensions of at least 1280 x 720.
Pinterest friendly images are taller than they are wide. However, you don’t want it to be too tall, otherwise it can be annoying! Pins in your feed are 238px wide and when they are expanded, they are 735px wide.
Profile pictures are again square shaped cropped into a circle – Pinterest recommend it being at least 165 x 165.
Most websites will offer the ability to crop your images after uploading them to be sized correctly, so don’t worry too much if you don’t want to create individual images for each social network! The main thing we would recommend is to have a square profile picture of at least 1080 x 1080 so you can upload it to all of the various networks you’re on when you want to change your profile picture.
What recommendations do you have for image sizing?
