Social Media Resize

Every platform crops. Upload a landscape photo to a feed that expects a square and something gets cut, and it is rarely the part you would have chosen. Resizing before you upload means the decision is yours.

There is a second reason, less obvious: platforms re-compress whatever you send them, and the further your image is from their target size, the more work their encoder does and the worse the result looks. Uploading something already close to the intended dimensions generally survives better.

This tool holds the common sizes so you do not have to look them up, and shows the exact pixel dimensions so you can see what you are about to get.

This is the only real decision in the tool, and it comes down to what you are willing to lose.

Fill is right when the frame must be full and the subject is near the middle. A portrait shot going into a square post usually fills well: you lose some of the top and bottom, and the face stays central. It is the default for feed images because empty bars look like a mistake in a scrolling feed.

Fit is right when the whole image matters — a wide landscape, a diagram, a screenshot, a group photo where someone is at the edge. The padding is visible, but nothing is cut. If you are fitting, pick a background colour that suits the image rather than defaulting to white on a dark photo.

The trap is filling with an extreme aspect change. Putting a 16:9 landscape into a 9:16 story means cropping away roughly three-quarters of the width, and the result is often unrecognisable. When the shapes are that far apart, either fit and accept the bars, or crop deliberately with the Crop tool so you choose the framing rather than letting the centre win by default.

One practical note about quality: always start from the largest version of the image you have. Resizing down discards pixels and looks fine; resizing up invents them and looks soft. A 4000-pixel original will make a better 1080-pixel post than a 600-pixel one ever can.