One Banner Photo, Three Header Shapes: Facebook Cover, X Header and an Instagram Post

You've made one wide banner graphic for a sale or an announcement - a headline and a logo across a wide image - and now it needs to go up as a Facebook cover photo, an X header, and probably an Instagram post too. Three placements, three unrelated shapes, from the one image you actually designed.

Same banner, three very different shapes

A Facebook cover photo (851×315) and an X header (1500×500) look similar at a glance - both short and wide - but they aren't the same ratio, and neither is close to the roughly square shape (1080×1080, or 1080×566 if you'd rather keep it landscape) an Instagram post wants. Feed a wide banner straight into a square crop with no adjustment and you'll typically lose most of the left and right sides, which is exactly where a headline or logo on a wide banner usually sits.

Why the focal point matters more here than on a centered photo

If your banner's text or logo sits anywhere other than dead-center - which is most banner layouts - a plain center crop for the square Instagram version will cut straight through it. Clicking the focal point once on the logo or the start of the headline fixes this for every size you tick afterward: the wide cover crop, the wider header crop, and the square post crop all key off that same point, instead of needing three separate manual crops to get the same result.

What each size is actually for, and one real quirk of each

The Facebook cover photo (851×315 recommended) displays smaller than you'd expect once it's live - around 820×312 on desktop and 640×360 on mobile, which trims the sides - so anything you need visible on every device is safest kept away from the very top and bottom edges. The X header (1500×500) has a similar real quirk: depending on the client someone's viewing it in, up to roughly 60 pixels can be cropped from the top or bottom, which is worth knowing before you place text right at the edge. The Instagram post size doesn't have an equivalent display-side surprise - what you export is close to what's shown - so it's the most forgiving of the three to get right.

Doing all three from one banner

Upload the banner once in Social media image resizer, click the focal point onto your logo or headline, then tick fb-cover, x-header, and either the square or landscape Instagram size depending on which fits your banner's proportions better without losing too much on the sides. Run it, and the zip comes back with all three, already cropped around the same point and named for their platform.

When the banner is smaller than a size needs

An X header at 1500×500 is a wide, high-pixel-count target - if your source banner is narrower than that, the tool flags the row and enlarges it to fit, which can look a little softer than the other exports. That's a disclosed tradeoff, not a silent one: the row tells you before you download, so you can decide whether to use a higher-resolution source instead.

Square post or landscape post: which Instagram shape fits a wide banner

A wide banner has two honest options on Instagram: the square post (1080×1080) or the landscape post (1080×566). The square crops more aggressively off the sides of a very wide banner, which is fine if the important content - the logo, the headline - sits centrally. The landscape option keeps more of the original width visible, at the cost of a shorter frame top to bottom, and tends to suit a wide banner better precisely because it doesn't force a wide image into a square hole. There's no universally correct choice here - it depends on how your specific banner is composed, which is exactly why it's worth ticking both and comparing the two thumbnails in the result strip before deciding which one to actually post.

For the step-by-step mechanics of the focal point and the tick list, see the how-to guide. Or try it on your own banner and see how the three shapes actually come out.