There is a lot of information about this on the web- but unfortunately, most of it is wrong or outdated. And this is not necessarily due to the author's mistake. The social media platforms are always fine tuning their image formats and the information changes. To make matters worse, there is conflicting information even when going straight to the source, ie Facebook or Twitter.

For example, here twitter recommends using a 2x1 image ratio1 for their large summary cards, however, twitter has new documentation on its business page mentioning the new 1.91:1 aspect ratio that was updated this August 2. Faceook is a bit better, but there is an overwhelming amount of information out there, and much of it is confusing. I had to learn the proper aspect ratios by digging into a lot of posts, and through trial and error. I have dug into at least a dozen posts for each image type and this is what I came up with and what proved to work for me best.

The following information should be correct as of October 28 2019. I will periodically try to update this list.

  • Twitter

    • Twitter Summary Card with a large image (1.91:1 aspect ratio):

      • Recommended width: 1200 pixels
      • Recommended height: 628

      • Minimum width: 518
      • Minimum height: 226
  • Facebook
    Facebook has a few more options. There is a large image type, but you can also choose from two different smaller image types. The smaller types allow the text to be floated to the right of the image whereas the larger type puts the text at the bottom underneath a larger image. The aspect ratio for the large image size is just a hair bigger than Twitter's Summary Card.

    • Facebook Shared Image (extremely close to the 1.91:1 twitter format, Facebook has a 1.91 aspect ratio):
      • Recommended width: 1200
      • Recommended height: 630

    • Facebook Link Image - Rectangular
      • Minimum width: 484
      • Minimum height: 252

    • Facebook Link Image - Square
      • Minimum width: 116
      • Minimum height: 116
  • Instagram

    • Recommended width: 1080 (1x1 aspect ratio)
    • Recommended height: 1080

    • Minimum width: 600
    • Minimum height: 315
  • Linked In
    LinkedIn images are very narrow and wide.

    • Recommended width: 1128
    • Recommended height: 376

    • Minimum width: 502
    • Minimum height: 282

If this sounds a little confusing, read on to the next post. In the next post, I will show the actual dimensions of each image type, and provide information how to use ColdFusion to manipulate images to obtain the desired size while keeping the proper aspect ratio.


1A 2x1 aspect ratio is recommended on this particular twitter page "Images for this Card support an aspect ratio of 2:1 with minimum dimensions of 300x157 or maximum of 4096x4096 pixels"
2Yet, this twitter page suggests the new 1.91:1 aspect ratio: "Image size: 800 x 418 pixels for 1.91:1 aspect ratio, 800 x 800 pixels for 1:1 aspect ratio"