Social video format tools

Vertical, square and widescreen: when to use each

A video's shape follows where it will be watched, not the other way round. A phone held upright fills its screen with a tall, narrow frame; a laptop or television fills it with a wide one. Choosing vertical, square or widescreen before you shoot or edit saves a reframing pass later, because cropping a wide shot down to a tall one after the fact means deciding, clip by clip, what gets cut out of frame.

Vertical, 9:16, is the shape built for full-screen mobile viewing, and it is the ratio behind almost every short-form ad placement on this page: Instagram and Facebook Reels ads, Instagram Feed video ads, TikTok's in-feed ads, one of LinkedIn's four feed video ad options, and the YouTube Shorts row sourced from Google Ads are all specified at 9:16. If a video is meant to be watched on a phone, held upright, without the viewer turning it sideways, this is the default shape to plan for.

Square, 1:1, is still offered as a video option too: LinkedIn's feed, for example, lists it as one of its four video ad ratios, splitting the difference between widescreen and vertical. LinkedIn's feed also offers a fourth option, 4:5, taller than square but not as tall as full 9:16. Widescreen, 16:9, remains the shape for a standard YouTube upload and for a screen someone is more likely to watch lying flat or mounted on a wall, a laptop, a television, a projector. None of these is a universal default: the platform and the placement decide which one fits.

It is worth planning the shape before the shoot where you can, rather than deciding afterwards, because the two extremes lose different things. A wide shot squeezed down to vertical loses everything outside a narrow central slice, while a vertical shot padded out to widescreen either leaves empty bars down each side or gets cropped at the top and bottom. Shooting with the primary platform's shape in mind, and leaving a little extra space around the subject, gives a later crop to a second shape more to work with.

Aspect ratio basics

An aspect ratio describes the shape of a frame as two numbers, width to height, without saying anything about the actual pixel count. 1920x1080 and 3840x2160 are very different resolutions, but both describe the same shape, because both reduce to 16:9. The ratio is the shape; the resolution is how many pixels are used to fill it.

To reduce a resolution to its simplest ratio, divide both numbers by their greatest common divisor, the largest number that divides into both evenly. 1920 and 1080 share a greatest common divisor of 120, so dividing both by 120 gives 16:9. The aspect ratio calculator on this site does that division for you: enter any width and height and it returns the reduced ratio directly, along with its decimal equivalent.

That decimal equivalent, width divided by height, is worth knowing alongside the ratio itself, because software and camera settings do not always speak in the same vocabulary: 16:9 is 1.778, 9:16 is 0.5625, and 1:1 is exactly 1. It also explains why a label like "21:9" is not always literally exact: a common 21:9 resolution, 2560x1080, actually reduces to 64:27 once the greatest common divisor is divided out, not a clean 21:9. "21:9" describes a family of ultra-widescreen resolutions loosely, rather than one precise mathematical ratio.

Two resolutions can also share a decimal without sharing a reduced ratio in the simplest terms people usually quote: what matters for whether a video fits a platform's placement without letterboxing or cropping is the reduced ratio itself, not just how close the decimal comes. Checking a resolution against the exact ratio a placement asks for, rather than a rounded-off decimal that looks close enough, is what the calculator on this page is for.

Platform video sizes at a glance

Most of the placements on this page share the same 9:16 ratio but not the same pixel count, and not the same kind of figure. Meta's ads guide states 1440x2560 as its own resolution for both Instagram Reels ads and Facebook Reels ads, and 1080x1920 for Instagram Feed video ads. Google Ads' Performance Max guidance recommends 1080x1920 for a YouTube Shorts-eligible video asset (YouTube Help's own Shorts page confirms the eligibility rules but states no pixel dimensions). TikTok's Ads Manager states a minimum of 540x960 for in-feed ads, worded as "more than or equal to" rather than a fixed figure. LinkedIn's maximum for its 9:16 feed video ad option is also 1080x1920.

Two ratios appear once each: LinkedIn's square feed video ad option is the only 1:1 entry here, a maximum of 1920x1920 with a stated minimum of 360x360, and LinkedIn's 4:5 feed video ad option is the only entry at that ratio, a maximum of 1080x1350 with a stated minimum of 360x450. Widescreen, 16:9, appears twice: YouTube's standard upload uses its own recommended resolution of 1920x1080 for its default 16:9 aspect ratio, and LinkedIn's landscape feed video ad option gives the same 1920x1080 as its maximum, with a stated minimum of 640x360.

The social media video sizes tool on this page holds the full table, filterable by platform, with every figure linked to the exact page it was checked against and the date it was last confirmed. Treat the summary above as an overview: for a specific export, check the live table, since a platform can revise its own specification page at any time.

Reframing landscape footage for vertical

Footage shot widescreen does not become vertical by stretching or squashing it into a taller frame: doing that distorts everything in the shot, faces included. What actually changes is the crop, a narrower slice of the original wide frame, and everything outside that slice is discarded rather than kept and reshaped.

The judgement call is where that narrower slice sits inside the wider one, and it usually needs to move. A static interview shot can often use one crop for the whole clip, but a shot where someone walks across the frame, or where the person speaking changes, needs the crop to track them, or the subject drifts out of frame entirely by the time the clip ends.

This is a separate step from the arithmetic of resizing. The aspect ratio calculator on this page will tell you the pixel dimensions a 9:16 crop needs to hit for a given source size, evenly rounded for an encoder, but it will not choose where inside the frame that crop sits. That decision is made clip by clip, watching the footage rather than just reading off a number.

It also helps to check what else is in the wide frame besides the main subject: burned-in captions, a lower-third graphic or a second person sitting just outside where the vertical crop will land can all get cut off unexpectedly once the frame narrows. Reviewing the wide footage with the target crop roughly marked out, before committing to it across a whole clip, catches most of these problems early.

YouTube thumbnails that pass upload checks

A custom video thumbnail is a separate image uploaded alongside a YouTube video, shown in search results and on the watch page before anyone presses play, and YouTube Help states that uploading one requires a verified account. (Verified against support.google.com/youtube/answer/72431, 22 September 2026.)

YouTube's own guidance gives a resolution of 3840x2160 for a video thumbnail and 2160x3840 for a Shorts thumbnail, with a minimum width of 640 pixels for a video thumbnail and a minimum height of 640 pixels for a Shorts thumbnail. Recommended aspect ratios are 16:9 for a standard video thumbnail, 9:16 for a Shorts thumbnail and 1:1 for a podcast thumbnail. The page names JPG or PNG as the formats to upload in. (Verified against support.google.com/youtube/answer/72431, 22 September 2026.)

File size limits depend on the device used to upload and, on mobile, on what the thumbnail is for: 2 MB for a video thumbnail or 10 MB for a podcast thumbnail on mobile, and 50 MB on desktop for a video, Shorts or podcast thumbnail alike. (Verified against support.google.com/youtube/answer/72431, 22 September 2026.) Checking an image against these figures, and against the video's own aspect ratio so nothing looks stretched in preview, before uploading is the difference between a thumbnail that gets accepted first time and one that bounces back with an error.

A checklist before you export

Confirm the target platform and placement first, not the export settings: a Reel and a standard YouTube upload from the same source footage need different crops and different final resolutions, and deciding that after exporting means doing the work twice.

Check the aspect ratio and dimensions for that specific placement, and its notes for whether the figure is a maximum, a minimum or the platform's own stated resolution, using the social media video sizes table on this page or the platform's own linked source page if the export is time-sensitive, since a spec can change between checks. Run the numbers through the aspect ratio calculator if you are cropping from a different source shape, and use the even-pixel figure it gives you rather than the raw one, so the encoder is not left to round it itself.

Before exporting, check the file size and duration limit for that placement against the platform's own current page, since both are exactly the kind of detail that changes without much notice. If the upload includes a custom thumbnail, check it separately against the platform's thumbnail requirements: a video passing every check and a thumbnail that gets rejected on file size is still a failed upload.

Finally, preview the export on the shape it was made for before publishing it: a vertical edit previewed full-screen on a phone will show a stray letterbox bar or an off-centre crop immediately, in a way a small preview window on a desktop editor often will not. A few minutes spent watching the finished export on the intended device catches the kind of mistake that is otherwise only visible once the video is already live.

Questions about social video formats

Do I need different video files for every platform?

Usually, yes, once you are exporting for more than one ratio. A single 16:9 export will letterbox or get cropped by the platform on a feed that expects 9:16, and a 9:16 export looks wrong pillarboxed into a 16:9 player. Exporting once per aspect ratio you actually need, using the sizes on this page, avoids both.

What is the safest aspect ratio if I can only export once?

There is no single safe choice, because it depends on where the video is going: 9:16 covers Reels, Shorts and most in-feed vertical placements, while 16:9 is still what a standard YouTube upload and most non-mobile viewing expects. Pick the ratio your primary platform actually specifies rather than guessing at a universal default.

Why do file sizes and durations vary by platform?

Each platform sets its own limits based on how it encodes, stores and serves video, which is one reason this page links to the platform's own current page for each row rather than restating a single universal number. TikTok's in-feed limit and Meta's Reels limit, for example, are not the same figure, and both can change independently of each other.

How do I know these sizes are still current?

Every row in the social media video sizes table links directly to the official page it was checked against, with a last-checked date next to it. If you are working to a hard deadline on a specific platform, following that link and reading the platform's own current page takes a minute and removes any doubt.