Mom Behind the Curtain

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The best image size for social media and blog posts

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Social media image sizes keep changing! and they all have different sizes and dimensions. Save youself time with this tip about one best photo size to use in blog posts and social media, including Facebbok, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. And learn how to process a big batch of photos all at once.Photo sizes for blogs and social media change all the time as screen resolution gets better. This can make it hard to know what size to upload photos to a blog. At this point, I’ve chosen to go with a social media size that seems to be the largest and hope it will last me for awhile without taking up too much space. Then to save even more time, I’m going to process the photos in batches all at once. AND at the same time I’m going to watermark them all.

Here’s how I decided on a size and dimensions.

Image size for blog posts

You can read the full version of everything I considered to decide on an image size for blog post social media sharing, but here’s the summary.

Images for Instagram

You’ve probably heard that photos for Instagram should be square. Well, they used to be. Now Instagram will let you upload photos that are not square, and according to the teen Instagram experts in my house, the best photos are uploaded with the same dimensions that the camera took them. Since I’m trying to have my photos last for awhile, and teens seem to be the leaders in all things digital, I’m going to go with those image ratios for my blog posts and social media. Besides, it means I don’t have to edit and crop!

Image requirements for Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook

Between Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, Facebook recommends the largest size. The recommended width for Facebook is 1200 px.

I decided not to go bigger because while they recommend that size, it’s actually much larger than what they’re currently displaying.

You may notice the obvious fact the Facebook dimensions are not the dimensions of a camera photo. Well, since I don’t have a dedicated staff to work on my photos (being there is just me), I just can’t edit a photo for the perfect dimensions for every social platform. I’ve tested my images and I’m satisfied with the results. And with the next change they might even be better than if I had perfected them!

Also, one Pinterest images this size will work best with the portrait orientation.

One best Image Size for Blog Posts, Instagram,Twitter, and Facebook

With the proportions of most camera images, if the short side is 1200 px, the image is 1200×1604 px. For this size image, it takes up 1828 KB of storage, 366 KB at 80% quality. This is where it helps to have a software expert who is also into photography. He says this size will be fine to handle with current hardware and software.

Currently, I get my most referral traffic from Pinterest. So I’m still going to take the time to make an optimized Pinterest image per post. But for posts with more than one image, I’ll use 1200×1604 px images in case someone wants to pin extra images from my post.

Photos straight from the camera are higher in quality and size though. So while I won’t need to change their dimensions or crop them individually, I still need to reduce their size. To save time, do a batch resize! I’ll go through the steps in the next post, Batch resize and watermark to photos using free IrfanView.