What Size Should Your Avatar, Story, or Banner Actually Be?

"What size should this be" is a question with a different answer depending on where the image is going. Rather than memorizing exact numbers for every platform, which change over time anyway, it helps to know the handful of shapes that cover almost every real destination, and why each shape is what it is.

Avatar or profile photo: 512x512

A small square is the near-universal shape for a profile picture, and 512x512 comfortably covers most platforms' actual minimum without being needlessly oversized for something usually displayed at 40 to 100 pixels on screen. It's also a good starting size before cropping; most avatar slots display as a circle, so leave a little breathing room around the subject when you crop rather than framing tightly to the very edge.

A square feed post: 1080x1080

The long-standing safe default for a square post: large enough to hold detail on a modern screen, small enough not to be needlessly heavy, and a shape that displays cleanly in a grid of other square thumbnails without cropping. It also doubles as a reasonable general-purpose square when you're not certain which specific platform an image will end up on.

A story or reel cover: 1080x1920

Tall and narrow, closer to a phone screen's own proportions than any of the other shapes here, because a story is viewed full-screen on a phone held upright, not scrolled past in a feed. Text or a subject placed too close to the top or bottom of a story-shaped image risks being covered by a platform's own on-screen controls, worth keeping anything important toward the vertical middle third.

A banner or video thumbnail: 1920x1080

Wide and landscape, the standard HD frame, right for anything that sits above or behind other page content, a header image, a video thumbnail, a wide promotional banner. It's also a sensible default landscape size when a platform's specific requirement isn't published anywhere.

A crisp, larger export: 3840x2160

The 4K frame, useful when a downstream use might display the image larger than a typical web slot, a presentation screen, a large print, or simply future-proofing an asset you don't want to re-shoot later. Since resizing up from a smaller original looks soft, this preset is most useful when your source photo is already large enough to genuinely support it, not as a way to manufacture detail that isn't there.

General web use: fit to 800px wide

Not a platform-specific target, a lighter, general-purpose size for embedding in a blog post, an email, or anywhere a full-resolution photo would be unnecessarily heavy without a specific pixel requirement to hit. Unlike the other five presets, this one only fixes the width and derives the height from your photo's own ratio, so a landscape and a portrait source both come out proportionally correct rather than forced into an identical box.

Building a whole set from one photo

Image resize applies one size to every image in a run, so a set of different sizes from one photo means one quick run per size: pick a preset, download, pick the next. Several source photos that all need the same size can go through together and download as one zip.

A worked example: launching on three platforms at once

Say a single hero photo needs to become a profile picture, a square announcement post, and a banner, three different destinations from one source. Drop the photo in, pick the Avatar preset and download, then switch to Square and download again, then HD 1920×1080. Three correctly-sized files from one photo, without leaving the page or opening three separate tools.

A pixel target doesn't fix a bad composition

Resizing to the right dimensions doesn't change what's actually in frame. If a photo is composed for a landscape shot and you need a square avatar out of it, resizing alone will squash it unless you crop first. The aspect ratio guide covers picking the right crop before the resize step, so the final image is both the right shape and the right composition, not just the right shape.

When the numbers actually change

Platform requirements aren't fixed forever, they shift over time as screens and interfaces change. Treat these six presets as the current, common defaults rather than permanent law, and if a specific platform's own upload guidance states a different exact number than one of these presets, type that number directly into the width and height fields rather than assuming the closest preset is close enough.

Try it with one photo and a couple of these presets, and see the whole set exported in one download.