A picture that looks good as a landscape post can lose important content when forced into a story canvas. Preparing the shape before publishing makes that tradeoff visible.
Social Image Preparation offers common square, portrait, story and landscape dimensions. These are preparation presets, not a promise that every platform uses one permanent requirement.
Compare contain and cover
Contain keeps the whole source and adds background space where its ratio differs from the canvas. Cover fills the canvas by cropping excess content.
A 400 by 300 photo placed inside the square 1080 by 1080 preset with Contain becomes approximately 1080 by 810 inside that canvas. There is space above and below it. Cover instead crops the photo to fill the square.
| Preset | Canvas pixels |
|---|---|
| Square | 1080 x 1080 |
| Portrait | 1080 x 1350 |
| Story | 1080 x 1920 |
| Landscape | 1200 x 675 |
Choose an anchor for Cover when the subject is not centred. The tool does not recognise a face, logo or caption automatically.
Keep interface overlays in mind
A platform can place buttons, account labels or captions over part of a published image. This tool does not supply every platform's safe area overlay, so leave practical space around important writing and check the destination preview.
The selected background fills unused space in Contain mode and composites transparent source areas. A strong background colour can change the whole presentation even though the source photo is unchanged.
Inspect text and faces after the composition. A preset satisfying a ratio does not guarantee good framing or a small enough file.
Keep the original and make separate versions for different shapes. Repeatedly cropping the square download into a portrait can discard more of the subject than preparing each version directly from the source.