Social Media Image Sizes 2026: UK Small Business Cheat Sheet

• Four shapes cover almost everything a small business posts: a square for logos and profile pictures, a square or upright rectangle for feed posts, a tall 9:16 frame for stories and short video, and a wide banner for cover images. Design those four once and you can post nearly anywhere.
• Aspect ratio matters more than pixel count. Every platform resizes your upload; none of them re-crop it kindly. Get the shape right and the file looks sharp everywhere, get it wrong and the platform will cut your logo in half.
• Only some platforms still publish exact figures. LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, YouTube and Pinterest state theirs plainly, and Meta's Ads Guide states feed and Stories image specs for Facebook and Instagram. When we checked the Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok profile and cover help pages on 27 August 2026, they did not give us readable numbers — which is exactly why third-party cheat sheets drift out of date.
• Design for the crop, not for the canvas. Cover images are trimmed differently on a laptop and on a phone, so anything that has to stay readable — your name, your town, your phone number — belongs in the middle third.

Search "social media image sizes" and you will find hundreds of charts, most of them copied from each other, many of them years stale. We have taken a different approach here: every pixel figure below comes from the platform's own current help documentation, checked on 27 August 2026, with the source named under each table so you can verify it yourself.

The cost of that discipline is honesty about the gaps. Several platforms have stopped publishing simple size charts, or serve their help pages in a way that does not hand over the text. Where a figure was not stated, we have written "check the platform's current help page" rather than guess. A wrong number is worse than a missing one — it produces a blurry banner that you only notice a fortnight later.

If you take one habit away from this guide, make it that one. Before a rebrand or a batch of new artwork, spend ten minutes on the four or five help pages that matter to you. They change more often than the charts do.

Facebook is the platform small businesses ask us about most, and the one whose specifications are now hardest to pin down. Facebook's help article on Page profile picture and cover photo dimensions returned no readable figures when we checked it, so we are not going to print numbers for those that we cannot attribute. What Meta does publish, in its Ads Guide, is the image specification for Feed and Stories placements — written for adverts, but the same shapes are what an organic post or story is displayed in, so we quote them.

Source: Meta Ads Guide — Facebook Feed image and Facebook Stories image specifications, checked 27 August 2026.

What we can say without a figure is how the cover behaves in practice. It is the one image where a centred, uncluttered design beats a clever one: put a plain photograph or a flat colour behind it, keep your business name and town near the middle, and accept that the edges will be lost on somebody's device. If your cover has to carry text out to the corners, it will fail on half your audience.

Instagram's help centre did not return usable dimensions to us for the profile picture, but Meta's Ads Guide states the Feed and Stories image specifications, which we quote below. What has not changed is the shape of the platform: a square profile picture shown as a circle, a grid built on squares, and a full-screen vertical frame for stories and reels.

Source: Meta Ads Guide — Instagram Feed image and Instagram Stories image specifications, checked 27 August 2026.

The practical rule for Instagram is that your profile grid is a shop window, so it should look deliberate at a glance. That is a design decision rather than a pixel one, and it is the part most small businesses skip.

LinkedIn still publishes a proper specification table, and it is the most precise of any platform here.

Source: LinkedIn Help — image specifications for Pages, checked 27 August 2026.

The 1512 × 256 px cover is worth dwelling on because it catches everyone out. It is nearly six times wider than it is tall. Any photograph you crop to that shape becomes a strip of sky or a row of knees. A flat background in your brand colour, your logo to one side and four or five words of positioning is the format that actually works, and it is quick to make once.

For a local business this is the most valuable image real estate you own, because it appears in the map pack and the knowledge panel where buying decisions get made. Google states one set of requirements covering business photos, logo and cover photo alike.

Source: Google Business Profile Help — photo and video guidelines, checked 27 August 2026.

Google also sets a quality bar rather than only a size one: the photo "should be in focus and well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters". That is a stronger constraint than the pixel figures for most small businesses. Heavily filtered phone photos, screenshots and stock imagery all sit awkwardly against it, and real photographs of your premises, your team and your finished work outperform them anyway.

Setting a profile up properly — including getting the photos and categories right — is a job we do as a one-off Google Business Page Setup and Verify add-on at £95, but it is entirely doable yourself in an afternoon.

Sources: YouTube Help — change your channel's banner image, and YouTube Help — add video thumbnails; both checked 27 August 2026.

The banner is the trickiest image on this list because YouTube displays it at wildly different crops on a television, a laptop and a phone. The centre of the image is the only part guaranteed to survive, so treat the outer thirds as decoration.

X's help page on customising your profile refused our request when we checked it, so we have no figures we can attribute.

TikTok's help centre did not give us dimensions either. In shape terms it is the simplest platform on the list: a square profile picture and a full-screen vertical video frame.

Pinterest publishes its figures on its product specifications page, which is written for advertising formats. The same shapes apply to organic Pins.

Source: Pinterest Help — Pinterest product specifications, checked 27 August 2026.

The 2:3 upright shape is genuinely different from everything else here, which is why Pinterest is usually the one platform that needs its own artwork rather than a reused post.

You do not need eleven versions of every graphic. You need four masters, and a habit of cropping from the middle.

Master one: the square logo mark. Every profile picture on every platform is square, and almost every one is displayed as a circle. Make a single square file with your logo mark — not your full logo with a wordmark — centred, with generous space around it. This one file becomes your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, TikTok and Pinterest profile picture.

Master two: the square or upright post. A square image is the most portable thing you can make. It posts to Instagram and Facebook without a crop and sits acceptably in a LinkedIn feed. If you want the extra height on a phone, work upright instead — but keep the important content inside the central square so a square crop never destroys it.

Master three: the 9:16 vertical. Stories, Reels, Shorts and TikTok all share this shape. Design it as a tall rectangle with a clear middle band: the top and bottom fifths get covered by the interface on every one of them.

Master four: the wide banner. This is the awkward one, because LinkedIn's 1512 × 256 px is a far narrower strip than YouTube's 16:9 2560 × 1440 px. The workable approach is to build the widest and tallest version first — a 16:9 banner at 2560 × 1440 px — and design it so that a narrow horizontal strip through the centre still says everything it needs to. Then export that strip for LinkedIn.

Two rules make all four hold together. Always crop from the centre outwards, never from a corner. And export at the recommended size rather than something larger — most platforms compress on upload, and a needlessly enormous file gets compressed harder, not less.

This is where consistency earns its keep. When your profile picture, colours and typography are the same across every platform, someone who found you on Google Maps recognises you on Facebook without having to think about it. That recognition is most of what a small business gets out of branding, and it costs nothing to maintain once it exists — it only costs something to establish. If you have never had that set properly, our Brand Starter Kit at £350 covers the logo, colour palette and typography you need to make these four masters from, and our social media work covers the running of it afterwards. If you would rather just ask us a question about a specific crop, email hello@brambla.co.uk.

What is the best all-purpose social media image size?

A square is the most portable single shape. It posts to Instagram and Facebook without being cropped, sits acceptably in a LinkedIn feed, and can be centre-cropped into a circle for any profile picture without losing anything important. If you only ever make one size of graphic, make it square and keep the meaningful content away from the edges. For anything vertical, such as stories, reels and short video, a 9:16 upright frame is the second shape you need.

What size should a Facebook cover photo be in 2026?

Facebook's own help article on Page profile picture and cover photo dimensions did not return readable figures when we checked it on 27 August 2026, so we are not going to quote a number we cannot attribute to Facebook. Check Facebook's current help page for the figure before you design. What has not changed is the behaviour: the cover is cropped differently on desktop and on mobile, so keep your business name, town and any text within the middle of the image rather than out toward the edges.

What are the correct LinkedIn image sizes?

LinkedIn publishes precise figures. A Page logo should be 400 by 400 pixels, with a minimum of 268 by 268. A Page cover image is 1512 by 256 pixels, which is both the minimum and the recommended size. A custom image on a Page post is recommended at a 1.91 to 1 ratio, or 1200 by 627 pixels, with a minimum width of more than 200 pixels. All images must be PNG or JPEG files with a maximum size of 3 megabytes. LinkedIn's Page specification article does not cover personal profile banners.

What size photos does Google Business Profile need?

Google asks for JPG or PNG files between 10 kilobytes and 5 megabytes, with a recommended resolution of 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall and a minimum of 250 by 250 pixels. Those requirements apply to business photos, your logo and your cover photo alike, and Google's guidelines page does not state separate aspect ratios for each. Google also asks that photos are in focus and well lit, with no significant alterations or excessive use of filters, which rules out heavily edited images.

Do I need different images for every platform?

No. Four master files cover nearly everything: a square logo mark for profile pictures, a square or upright image for feed posts, a 9:16 vertical for stories and short video, and a wide banner for cover images. The only common shape that genuinely needs its own artwork is the Pinterest Pin, which is a 2 to 3 upright at 1000 by 1500 pixels. Build the four masters, crop from the centre outwards, and export at each platform's recommended size rather than uploading something far larger.

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