Facebook Image Size Guide

Facebook image size specifications for 2026

Facebook serves images across a wider range of surfaces than most social platforms — feed posts, link cards, cover photos, Stories, Reels, Events, Groups and Marketplace all have different dimension requirements. Getting them right at upload time means Facebook renders your image as you intended rather than cropping, letterboxing or aggressively recompressing it.

Feed posts: square vs portrait and how Facebook handles the difference

Facebook's news feed accepts a fairly wide aspect ratio window for photo posts, but the platform quietly clips anything outside the 4:5 to 1.91:1 envelope. Within that window, you have two practical choices for still images: 1080 × 1080 px square (1:1) and 1080 × 1350 px portrait (4:5).

The square format is the most predictable. It renders without any cropping or letterboxing on every surface — desktop feed, mobile feed, profile photo grid and shared previews all show the full image. If you are posting product photos or graphics that need to survive multiple surfaces without custom-tailoring each one, square is the format to reach for.

The 4:5 portrait at 1080 × 1350 px takes up more vertical real estate in the mobile feed, which research consistently shows leads to longer dwell time per post. The tradeoff is that on desktop, Facebook letterboxes tall portraits to fit the fixed-height preview, so the subject benefits from being centred vertically. Plan the composition so the most important element survives both the full-height mobile view and the desktop letter-box crop.

Images taller than 4:5 are automatically cropped to 4:5 by Facebook at ingest. If your phone photo is 3:4 or 9:16, the platform selects a centre crop before any viewer sees it. You can avoid this by cropping to 4:5 yourself first, so you control the framing rather than the algorithm.

Link preview images (Open Graph): the 1200 × 630 standard

When you paste a URL into a Facebook post, Facebook fetches the page's Open Graph image tag and renders it as a link card below your text. The canonical size for that image is 1200 × 630 px, which sits at a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. This is the size that renders as a large, full-width card on both desktop and mobile.

The minimum size Facebook will display as a large card is 600 × 315 px. Below that threshold, the image shrinks to a small left-aligned thumbnail beside the link text — a significantly less prominent placement. If you manage a website and your og:image is smaller than 600 × 315 px, every Facebook share of that URL shows a diminished preview.

The og:image tag must be set in the page's HTML head. The format is: <meta property="og:image" content="https://yourdomain.com/social.jpg" />. Facebook also caches og:image aggressively. After you update the tag on your page, you need to submit the URL to the Facebook Sharing Debugger to force a cache refresh; otherwise old shares continue to show the old image for up to 24 hours.

Cover photos: designing for both desktop and mobile crops

Facebook displays the page or profile cover photo at different sizes depending on the surface. On desktop, it renders at 820 × 312 px — a wide, flat banner. On mobile, the same image is displayed at 640 × 360 px — a taller, squarer crop centred on the middle of the image. These are very different aspect ratios: roughly 2.63:1 on desktop vs approximately 1.78:1 on mobile.

The practical recommendation is to upload at 820 × 462 px or larger. That size satisfies the desktop width of 820 px while giving the mobile crop enough vertical room to show correctly. Place your logo, text or key visual element in a horizontal band running through the vertical centre of the image — that centre strip survives both crops without losing important content to the edges.

The minimum Facebook accepts for cover upload is 400 × 150 px, but that renders blurry on any modern screen. On HiDPI (Retina) screens, upload at 1640 × 924 px or larger so the cover looks sharp at 2× pixel density.

Stories and Reels: the 9:16 canvas and the safe zone

Facebook Stories and Reels share the same full-screen vertical canvas: 1080 × 1920 px at a 9:16 aspect ratio. Both formats fill the phone display edge-to-edge in portrait orientation, which is why they require a different mental model from the horizontal-bias of the regular feed.

The safe zone is the portion of the canvas that is free of UI overlays. At the top, the profile avatar, username, and close button occupy roughly 250 px. At the bottom, the reply bar and reaction controls take up another 250 px. That leaves an unobstructed middle band of approximately 1080 × 1420 px. Any faces, text overlays, or call-to-action buttons you want to be fully visible should live inside that band.

For Reels, Facebook also generates a feed thumbnail. Depending on the viewer's surface, this is displayed at either a square 1:1 crop or the native 9:16 tall crop. When you post a Reel, choose a cover frame that reads clearly at both crops — a face or product that is centred in the frame tends to survive both.

Why Facebook recompresses your images and how to minimise quality loss

Facebook recompresses every uploaded image before serving it. The platform targets a file size ceiling driven by its CDN delivery costs, not your source quality, which means a carefully exported JPEG at 95 % quality is reduced to roughly 85 % quality — or lower for images with fine texture and gradients — at ingest. This compression is lossy and the quality reduction is permanent from Facebook's stored copy.

To minimise visible quality loss after Facebook's recompression:

• Upload at exactly the recommended pixel dimensions (e.g., 1080 × 1080 px for square feed posts). Giving Facebook an image that is already at the output size means it skips the downsampling step and only applies JPEG recompression — one destructive pass instead of two.
• Save your JPEG at 80–85 % quality before uploading. Uploading at higher quality does not improve the final result because Facebook's own recompression overrides your setting. You only add upload time and file size.
• Use sRGB colour profile. Facebook converts any image with a non-sRGB embedded profile to sRGB as part of processing. If you work in Adobe RGB or Display P3 and export without profile conversion, the colours shift at upload time. Explicitly convert to sRGB and embed the profile in your export settings to keep colour consistent.
• Avoid uploading a previously downloaded Facebook image as a new post. Each upload–download cycle adds another JPEG recompression layer. The downloaded copy is already lossy; recompressing it amplifies artefacts visibly.

JPG vs PNG: which format to use for Facebook uploads

For photographic images — portraits, landscapes, product photos with smooth colour gradients — upload as JPEG. Facebook recompresses both formats at ingest anyway, but JPEG reaches the same visual quality as PNG at a much smaller file size. A well-compressed JPEG photo at 1080 × 1080 px typically sits between 300 KB and 600 KB. A PNG of the same scene is 3–8 MB with no visible advantage after Facebook's pipeline has processed it.

PNG is the better choice for images with flat areas of solid colour, hard edges, graphic text, logos, or illustrations with transparent backgrounds. PNG's lossless compression preserves sharp edges without the JPEG blocking artefacts that appear around high-contrast text and line art. Even after Facebook recompresses a PNG to JPEG internally, the starting point is cleaner and the output quality is higher than if you had uploaded a JPEG of the same graphic.

Facebook accepts uploads up to 4 MB per image for most surfaces. Stories allow up to 4 MB for photos and 4 GB for videos. In practice, a correctly sized JPEG is well under 1 MB, so the limit is rarely reached for still images. The limit is more relevant for high-resolution PNG files created with design tools.

Event cover photos and Marketplace: surface-specific sizing

The Facebook Events cover photo has its own unusual dimensions: 1920 × 1005 px, which is close to a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. In practice, Facebook displays the event cover at 470 × 174 px in event browse cards and at a wider banner in the event detail view. A safe approach is to design on a 1920 × 1005 px canvas and keep the key visual element in the horizontal centre, roughly in the middle third of the vertical space, so both the banner and card crops show it correctly.

Facebook Marketplace enforces a 1:1 square crop for product images in the browse grid. If you upload a portrait or landscape product photo, Facebook crops it from the centre. For products where the full shape matters — furniture, clothing, vehicles — shoot and export at 1:1 before uploading so the entire product is visible in the grid without algorithmic cropping. The minimum recommended size for Marketplace product images is 1080 × 1080 px.

File size limits, metadata and privacy before you upload

Facebook's published upload limit is 4 MB for feed images and 4 GB for videos. What receives less attention is the metadata Facebook extracts and uses from uploaded images. A standard smartphone JPEG typically embeds GPS coordinates, capture time, device model, and sometimes user-applied tags in its EXIF block. Facebook can read all of this data at upload, regardless of what the platform later strips from the public-facing download.

If you are uploading images of clients, patients, children, or any subject who has not consented to their location data being shared with a platform, consider removing the metadata from the photo before uploading. This strips the GPS block, device information and capture time from the JPEG without affecting the visual content of the image. For bulk workflows, stripping image metadata across multiple files at once is more efficient than editing each file individually.

Both tools on this site run entirely in your browser. The images never leave your device during the metadata removal process — you can verify this by opening the Network tab in DevTools before dropping a file and confirming that no outbound requests appear.

How to diagnose unexpected cropping after a Facebook upload

If your image looks different on Facebook than it did before uploading, work through these steps in order to identify the cause:

1. Check the pixel dimensions of your original using the image dimensions checker on this page. Confirm the width is at least 1080 px and the aspect ratio matches the target format from the table above.
2. Check the aspect ratio. If the ratio falls outside Facebook's accepted window for the surface you are posting to, the platform crops it automatically. For feed posts, the window is 4:5 to 1.91:1. Anything outside that range is cropped to the nearest limit.
3. Check the colour profile. If the image looks desaturated or colour-shifted, you likely exported in a wide-gamut colour space (Adobe RGB, Display P3) without converting to sRGB first. Re-export with sRGB explicitly selected in your editing software.
4. Check for surface-specific crop rules. Cover photos are displayed at different ratios on desktop versus mobile. Marketplace images are always square in the browse grid. Link preview images require a specific og:image tag and a minimum 600 × 315 px size.
5. Check the file size. Images over 4 MB may be rejected or aggressively recompressed during upload. Reduce the dimensions or JPEG quality if the file size is near the limit.