What is 1200 × 630 used for?

It is the Open Graph image — the picture that appears when a link to your page is posted on a social network, sent in a chat app, or pasted into a messaging thread. The page declares it in a meta tag and the platform fetches it. It is often the single most-seen image a page has, because far more people see the preview than click through.

Why 1.91:1 and not 16:9?

It is a convention that began with Facebook’s preview card and was adopted widely enough to become the safe default. It is slightly wider than 16:9. Most platforms accept a range of shapes and crop to their own, so the practical value of matching 1.91:1 is that it is the shape least likely to be re-cropped by anyone.

Will my text be readable in the preview?

Only if it is large. A 1200-pixel preview is frequently displayed at 300 pixels wide in a phone’s chat list, so anything under roughly 40 pixels tall in the original becomes unreadable. Design for the small version: a few large words, high contrast, and nothing important near the edges, since some platforms crop them.

Does the file size matter?

Yes, more than for most images. Preview images are fetched by the sharing platform, often on a timeout, and a very large file can mean the preview simply does not appear. Keeping it under a few hundred kilobytes is sensible; set a maximum under Advanced options and it is handled in the same pass as the resize.

Resize an image to 1200 × 630

The link preview size, already set. This is the picture that appears when someone shares your page.

Choose an imageor drag it here, or paste it

JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF and BMP. Your file is processed on your device.

Width (px)

Height (px)

Leave one blank to keep the original proportions. Set both and the image is cropped from the centre rather than stretched.

How do I resize an image to 1200x630?

Add your image below — 1200×630 is already filled in — and download the result. This is the shape social networks and messaging apps use to render a link preview, and it is unusually wide at roughly 1.91:1, so reaching it from an ordinary photograph means a substantial band comes off the top and bottom.

The image most people will see

When a link to a page is posted anywhere — a social network, a group chat, a forum, a messaging app — the platform fetches an image the page has nominated and renders it as a card. That image gets seen by everyone who scrolls past the post, which is invariably far more people than click the link.

1200 × 630 is the size that convention settled on for it. Platforms accept other shapes and crop them to their own, so matching this one is mostly about being the shape nobody needs to re-crop.

It is wider than anything your camera makes

At roughly 1.91:1 this is a letterbox. A 4:3 phone photo made this shape loses about a third of its height; a portrait photograph loses most of itself. That is a real amount of picture, and it is why so many link previews look like an arbitrary horizontal slice of something — because that is exactly what they are.

Two ways to handle it. Crop deliberately: put the crop frame over the part that reads at a glance, rather than accepting the centre. Or do not crop at all — put the whole image on a 1200×630 canvas with a background colour behind it using the border tool, which is what you want for a logo or a portrait that a crop would ruin.

Design for the small version

The number 1200 is misleading. In a phone’s chat list the same image is displayed around 300 pixels wide, and in some feeds smaller than that. Text that is comfortable at full size disappears entirely at a quarter of it.

The rules that follow are simple: very few words, very large, with strong contrast against whatever is behind them. Keep anything essential away from the edges, because platforms that use a different ratio will trim them. And check the result at thumbnail size before you publish it — shrinking the preview in your own browser takes a second and catches most of what goes wrong.

Keep it light

A preview image is fetched by the sharing platform’s own crawler, usually with a short timeout, and a heavy file can mean no preview appears at all. A few hundred kilobytes is plenty at this size.

Set a maximum under Advanced options and it happens in the same pass as the resize, which is better than compressing afterwards: FileBelow treats the 1200×630 dimensions as a floor it may not go below and spends the byte budget on quality instead.

Neighbouring sizes: 1920 × 1080 is the other wide format and is the one to use for anything shown on a screen rather than in a preview card. If the preview image also has to be light, 200 KB is a sensible ceiling.

Common questions

What is 1200 × 630 used for?: It is the Open Graph image — the picture that appears when a link to your page is posted on a social network, sent in a chat app, or pasted into a messaging thread. The page declares it in a meta tag and the platform fetches it. It is often the single most-seen image a page has, because far more people see the preview than click through.
Why 1.91:1 and not 16:9?: It is a convention that began with Facebook’s preview card and was adopted widely enough to become the safe default. It is slightly wider than 16:9. Most platforms accept a range of shapes and crop to their own, so the practical value of matching 1.91:1 is that it is the shape least likely to be re-cropped by anyone.
Will my text be readable in the preview?: Only if it is large. A 1200-pixel preview is frequently displayed at 300 pixels wide in a phone’s chat list, so anything under roughly 40 pixels tall in the original becomes unreadable. Design for the small version: a few large words, high contrast, and nothing important near the edges, since some platforms crop them.
Does the file size matter?: Yes, more than for most images. Preview images are fetched by the sharing platform, often on a timeout, and a very large file can mean the preview simply does not appear. Keeping it under a few hundred kilobytes is sensible; set a maximum under Advanced options and it is handled in the same pass as the resize.