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Figuring out how big to make your cover photos can be a bit trickier than simply finding the standard dimensions given. Here’s a small guide to help along with templates for Facebook & Twitter, and a quick guide to all Social Media image sizes and templates below!
Quick Guide to Social Media Image Sizes:
Page Cover Photo: 820 x 360 *template below
Group Cover Photo: 1640 x 856 *template below
Profile Photo: 170 x 170
Header Cover Photo: 1500 x 500 *template below
Profile Photo: 400 x 400
Profile Photo: 180 x 180
Ideal Photo Sizes: 1080 x 1080 Square format, or a long vertical photo of 1080 x 1350.
*Square format for photo slideshows is necessary.
Pinned Photo Size: Use a vertical pin in 2:3 aspect ratio, such as 1000 x 1500
Board Cover Images: 800 x 800
Profile Photo: 165 x 165You Tube
Channel Art: 2560 x 1440
*Google provides templates and guidelines to make the best channel art image.
Facebook Page Cover Photo Size Template
820 x 360
What is the best size to use for a Facebook Page Cover image? I’m going to say 820 x 360 pixels, and here’s why:
- Displays at 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on your Page on computers and 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall on smartphones
- Must be at least 400 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall
- Loads fastest as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes
Ok, so here’s the thing. Those are 2 different dimensions for desktop vs. mobile (actually 3 if you count the “loads fastest” size). And that matters a lot. You can make a great banner with your logo text on it and it’ll look great on a desktop, but look at it on your phone and, “Omg the text is cropped, this looks awful!” –happened to me! :/
So…logically, if we make the image based on the max dimensions of both desktop(bigger width at 820px), and mobile(bigger height at 360px), then make sure our text or anything important we want displayed is in the middle, inside the minimum dimensions, that should do it, right?
Almost…
In fact it did work perfectly on my desktop. On my phone too. Then I checked it out on my tablet, and the height looked right, but, uh-oh…width is cropped more than 640 pixels! What’s going on? Well to be honest I’m not sure. It probably has something to do with different screen sizes, and the fact that there’s really no one size fits all Facebook cover image.
So, keeping this in mind, we should leave some small margins on each side of the 640 pixel width.
Above is a template for a Facebook Page Cover Image you can use and download. If you have a decent photo editing software, you can use this template and set it on a layer above your image. Set the template layer to Blend Mode: Multiply, and you’ll see through the parts to help guide you to placing any text or logos.
Facebook also recommends that you upload your image as a .png for best quality. And I can attest to this as well. I uploaded a .jpg at first, and I noticed on my tablet the image had some blurry artifacts going on-they weren’t there on the larger image on my desktop, nor did I see them on my phone. However since I want the best quality on all formats, I tried using a .png, and sure enough, it looked better!
Facebook Group Cover Photo Size Template
1640 x 856
For Facebook Groups, the size is a bit different than a Page cover photo. The given dimensions are 1640×856, however this gets cropped a bit on desktop. I made the below template to show where the crop lines would be, so as long as you keep everything important in the blue box, you’ll be fine!
Twitter Cover Photo Size Template
1500 x 500 pixels
Twitter’s Header Photo dimensions are 1500 x 500 pixels. This looks great on mobile & tablets, I didn’t notice any issues. However on my much larger desktop monitor, the image was stretched and sized to the width of the browser-which could be a lot larger than 1500px wide depending on your monitor. The text in my logo was getting kind of blurry and not looking so great :/ Not to mention a little bit of the top and bottom of the image is cropped.
So what to do here? Well I did a test with uploading a larger image in the same proportions. I doubled the size, so instead of 1500 x 500, I made it 3000 x 1000 pixels. I was able to do this because I had my image in a larger format to begin with.
Turns out uploading a larger image looks almost the same as uploading it in the default size. I noticed that the 1500 one uploaded was a little be sharper than the 3000. I know some people online say that you should upload it larger, but I really did not see better quality. In fact, I liked the slightly added sharpness of the 1500 so went with keeping that one!
The other thing to keep in mind is, if you have text, or anything important, you’re going to want to keep it in the center, and don’t make it too large. It gets obnoxiously big on a desktop screen fast. So you may have to play around with sizing your text just right, but from my experience following this template should get you good results:
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