The 2026 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet (Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube)

Every platform recompresses what you upload. The only defense is uploading something that already matches what they'll do to it — right ratio, right pixel target, no EXIF — so their compressor has nothing to improvise. Here's the numbers table, and the batch workflow to hit it from your phone.

Platforms change specs; these are the values that hold up well as of late 2026. When a platform "changes nothing visibly," it usually just re-crops to these ratios — so the ratio matters more than the last pixel.

Feed dimensions that still matter

The quiet pattern: 1.91:1 is the link-preview lingua franca (LinkedIn + Facebook + most CMS cards), and 4:5 / 9:16 won the phone era (vertical fills the screen, screen-fill wins feeds).

The three settings that decide whether your upload survives

• Match the ratio before uploading. Cropping after the fact (or letting the platform do it) is how heads leave the frame. Crop to the target ratio first, then let the resize do the rest.
• Export slightly larger than display size, then cap. Instagram stores your 1080px image; X serves ~1200px wide. Exporting at ~1.5× the display size costs nothing and survives retina feeds — beyond that you're just paying bytes nobody sees.
• Strip EXIF — twice valuable. Location metadata riding along to a public post is a privacy leak with zero upside, and every platform strips it anyway: their re-encode throws it out on the server, so keeping it only means bigger files until then. Strip locally, upload smaller.

Prepping a batch on the phone without touching Photoshop

For one image this is five minutes in any editor. For fifty — a conference photo dump, a week of product shots for four platforms — that's a machine job. The workflow I built into PixTally (Android, on-device, no uploads): each platform above is a saved recipe — a chain of Crop (ratio) → Resize (px cap) → Compress (size budget) → Strip EXIF — pick the recipe, multi-select through the system photo picker, preview planned sizes, convert. The built-in set covers the exact rows in the table:

Originals stay untouched (results go to a Pictures/ subfolder), and every run is replayable — next week's photo dump gets the same recipes, one tap. Install: Google Play.

The 30-second version

• Ratio first, pixels second: 1:1 (1080²), 4:5 (1080×1350), 9:16 (1080×1920), 1.91:1 (1200×627), 16:9 (1280×720 for YouTube, 1600×900 elsewhere).
• ≤500 KB per image is the size that gets you through everywhere that matters.
• Strip EXIF before anything goes public — always free, sometimes load-bearing for privacy.
• Prep the batch before opening any app that previews it; recompressed previews lie about quality.

If your bottleneck is size caps rather than dimensions, the compress-to-exact-size guide goes deeper on the size-budget mechanics, and batch WebP conversion covers the format swap that saves another ~30%.