Open Graph Image Size Calculator

An og:image tag tells a social platform crawler which picture to display in a link preview. The de facto standard is 1200 by 630 pixels, an aspect ratio of about 1.91:1, which fills the large card layout on Facebook and LinkedIn without cropping. Dropping below the minimum of 600 by 315 usually demotes the preview to a small square thumbnail beside the text, a markedly less prominent result. The 1200 px width is roughly double the layout width the card occupies, so the image stays sharp on 2x density displays. Other surfaces want other shapes. Twitter, now X, reads twitter:image, and its summary_large_image card also uses roughly 1.91:1, while the plain summary card is square. Pinterest favors a 2:3 portrait, commonly 1000 by 1500, and Instagram feed images are square or 4:5. Because platforms crop differently in feeds, notifications, and mobile views, keep logos and text inside approximately the central 80 percent of the frame, which for a 1200 by 630 image means a safe area of about 960 by 504. File size ceilings are generous, around 8 MB for Facebook and 5 MB for most Twitter cards, but crawlers time out, so keeping JPEG previews under roughly 300 KB is the practical target. Two caveats cause most failures: og:image must be an absolute URL because relative paths are not resolved, and platforms cache aggressively, so a replaced image typically requires forcing a refetch through the platform own debugging tool before the new preview appears.

Facebook announced the Open Graph protocol at its f8 developer conference on 21 April 2010, alongside the Like button. The aim was to let any web page describe itself as an object in the Facebook social graph, and the protocol was specified as a small vocabulary of RDFa meta tags placed in the document head: og:title, og:type, og:image, og:url, and a handful of optional properties, documented at ogp.me. It was deliberately simpler than earlier structured-data efforts such as microformats and full RDF, and that simplicity drove adoption well beyond Facebook itself. Twitter published Twitter Cards in June 2012 with a parallel set of twitter-prefixed meta tags, but built in a fallback to Open Graph tags when its own were absent, which effectively cemented the og prefix as the shared baseline. LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and most messaging clients followed the same convention rather than inventing new vocabularies. Recommended dimensions have drifted with interface redesigns rather than through any formal revision of the protocol, which has changed very little since 2010. The guidance of 1200 by 630 pixels emerged as Facebook feed moved to large-format link cards during the mid-2010s, and it has held since. Platform-side caching and the resulting need for debugging tools appeared soon after launch, when publishers found that correcting a mistyped image URL had no visible effect for days.