How to Properly Resize Your Images for Social Media and the Web

You've put in all that hard work to create the photograph you wanted, so don't undo a lot of your efforts by not properly resizing for which ever platform you're going to post it on, including your own portfolio.

Resizing your photographs is one of those tasks that's so simple and easy at first glance, you might not think about the process. Furthermore, most platforms like Instagram and Facebook will just resize the images for you, so why bother? Well, as almost every photographer I've ever spoken to has noticed with platforms like Facebook, the quality loss is substantial. On platforms that don't automate the process, you could end up making your website incredibly slow to load for many viewers.

In this video Karl Taylor shows you how to properly resize images for web and social media, including your portfolio which is by far the most important of the lot. Taylor does a brilliant and clear job of explaining many important factors, so I won't do him a disservice by repeating anything. One tip I would give is that for certain applications of your images — for example, setting an image as your Facebook page's banner — there are native dimensions which you ought to aim at matching. As of the day I'm writing this article, the Facebook banner size is 820 x 462 pixels.

How do you resize your images?

Robert K Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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5 Comments

Not everyone is well versed as you when it comes to this subject. So even though you may be an expert at this, it could be quite helpful to someone else who's a novice at it. IJS

Like me! IG's dimension requirements seem straightforward. But, there are times when I lose parts of my image even though it has the required dimensions. And, to get the full image without amputations, I get this thick border on the sides.

Very comprehensive information about something many don't understand and just guess for the best. We always need to remember not everyone is in tune as others think they are when it comes to digital imaging. We might well laugh a someone's lack of knowledge; but then the barber, the candlestick maker, and the baker may well laugh at our (photographers) limited knowledge of their "simple" profession .
Good one Rob :)
PS: time to get modern and include Affinity photo :lol: :)

I've read a ton of conflicting information - much of it probably obsolete - about optimal sizing and sharpening for Faceboook.

I just export at 3000px long. I don't bother resizing for each platform since they'll resize and compress anyway. I haven't noticed any discernible difference and viewing online.

Facebook, Instagram, and Fstoppers will resize and have an aggressive compression.

Twitter I believe will keep a max size of 4096x4096. Their compression doesn't appear to be as aggressive. Also, I could have sworn I read somewhere, there's a way to upload without them compressing it. You'd have to upload as a PNG and some other specs. Something like that.