Short answer: a centre crop keeps whatever share of the photo the two shapes have in common, and with a normal 4:3 phone photo that is rarely much. Across all 143 size presets on Pixohub, the landscape test photo kept 61.7% of its area on average and the portrait photo 59.0%. A 9:16 story keeps 42% of a landscape photo, a 4:1 banner keeps a third, and the 1512 × 256 LinkedIn Page cover keeps 23%. As for format, the default PNG files came out 7 to 10 times larger than the JPG version, and 14 of the PNGs were over the platform's own published upload limit. Only one JPG preset broke a limit.
We ran this test because of a bug we found. Until October 2026 Pixohub's size presets stretched a photo to the exact target pixels whenever the shapes differed, so faces in a story-sized landscape photo came out squashed. The preset pages now centre-crop by default, with two alternatives: Fit, white bars keeps the whole image and pads it, and Stretch keeps the old behaviour for anyone who wants it. There is also a JPG (smaller) download at 85% quality. Every figure below was measured on the fixed version.
How much of the photo each shape keeps
Both test photos are 12-megapixel iPhone shots: one landscape (4032 × 3024) and one portrait (3024 × 4032). Both are 4:3. The table groups the 143 presets by shape. "Kept" is the share of the original photo that is still in the output after the centre crop.
| Preset shape | Presets | Example | Landscape photo kept | Portrait photo kept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4:3 | 2 | Dribbble shot 1600 × 1200 | 100% | 56.3% |
| 16:10 | 5 | Wallpaper 1920 × 1200 | 83.3% | 46.9% |
| 16:9 | 17 | YouTube thumbnail 1280 × 720 | 75% | 42.2% |
| 1.91:1 (link preview) | 7 | Facebook post 1200 × 630 | 69.6–70.0% | 39.2–39.4% |
| 3:1 | 4 | X header 1500 × 500 | 44.4% | 25% |
| 4:1 | 3 | LinkedIn banner 1584 × 396 | 33.3% | 18.8% |
| 5.9:1 | 1 | LinkedIn Page cover 1512 × 256 | 22.6% | 12.7% |
| 1:1 | 34 | Instagram post 1080 × 1080 | 75% | 75% |
| 4:5 | 4 | Instagram portrait 1080 × 1350 | 60% | 93.8% |
| 2:3 | 3 | Pinterest Pin 1000 × 1500 | 50% | 88.9% |
| 9:16 | 12 | Instagram story 1080 × 1920 | 42.2% | 75% |
| 9:19.5 to 9:20 (phones) | 11 | iPhone 15 wallpaper 1179 × 2556 | 33.7–34.7% | 59.9–61.6% |
The pattern is simple. The further a preset's shape is from 4:3, the more gets cut, and which edges go depends on the photo's orientation. A landscape photo loses its sides in anything taller than 4:3. A portrait photo loses its top and bottom in anything wider. Square presets are the only ones that treat both photos alike: each keeps exactly 75%, because a 4:3 frame always gives up a quarter to become 1:1.
- Very few presets keep almost everything. Only 7 presets kept 90% or more of the landscape photo, and 13 kept 90% or more of the portrait one. Just two presets (the 4:3 ones, 1024 × 768 and the Dribbble shot) needed no crop at all for the landscape photo. For the portrait photo the 3:4 18 × 24 inch poster kept 100% and the iPad Pro wallpaper 99.95%.
- Banners are the hardest. Even if you pick whichever of the two photos suits the banner better, 17 presets keep less than half of it. The worst five are the LinkedIn Page cover (22.6% of the landscape photo), the triple-monitor wallpaper 5760 × 1080 (25%), the Reddit banner 1920 × 384 (26.7%), the SoundCloud banner 2480 × 520 (28.0%), and a three-way tie at 33.3% between the LinkedIn banner, the Etsy cover and the Patreon cover.
- Tall phone screens are hard too. Modern phone wallpapers are about 9:19.5. A landscape photo keeps only a third of itself there: 34.6% for the iPhone 15, 33.8% for the Pixel 8.
- Picking the right photo matters more than the preset. For a 9:16 story, the portrait photo keeps 75% and the landscape one keeps 42.2%. For a 16:9 YouTube thumbnail it is the other way round: 75% for landscape, 42.2% for portrait.
Why stretching was the wrong default
The share a crop keeps is also how badly a stretch distorts the photo. Squeezing the 4:3 landscape photo into 9:16 without cropping makes everything 42% as wide as it should be relative to its height, the same 42% that the crop keeps. Stretching the portrait photo into a 4:1 LinkedIn banner made everything 5.3 times too wide, which is the inverse of the 18.8% the crop keeps. Small mismatches, like 4:3 into 16:10, were barely visible. The large ones, which most social shapes are, were obvious. The old preset did this quietly to every off-shape photo.
Centre-cropping keeps faces and buildings in proportion, but it decides for you what to cut. If the important part is near an edge, use Aspect Ratio Crop first to choose the area yourself, then resize. If nothing may be lost (a document, a poster, a group photo), choose Fit, white bars or pad the image with Expand Canvas. The size will be right and the whole image stays, but you get bars at the sides or top. The shape choice only appears when the photo's shape differs from the preset by 1% or more. Same-shape photos are simply scaled.
PNG or JPG: what the files weigh
The presets save PNG by default. PNG is lossless, so it doesn't add compression artefacts, but a photo saved as PNG is heavy. Across all 143 presets, the median PNG was 10.5 times the size of the matching JPG for the landscape photo and 7.2 times for the portrait photo. The ratio was never below 5.7.
| Preset | Output | Photo | PNG | JPG (85%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram post | 1080 × 1080 | Landscape / portrait | 2.0 MB / 2.7 MB | 179 KB / 377 KB |
| Instagram story | 1080 × 1920 | Landscape / portrait | 3.0 MB / 4.5 MB | 297 KB / 601 KB |
| X header | 1500 × 500 | Landscape / portrait | 1.5 MB / 1.8 MB | 159 KB / 226 KB |
| YouTube banner | 2560 × 1440 | Landscape / portrait | 5.8 MB / 7.8 MB | 571 KB / 1.0 MB |
| Amazon product | 2000 × 2000 | Landscape / portrait | 5.6 MB / 8.4 MB | 540 KB / 1.2 MB |
| Poster 18 × 24 in | 5400 × 7200 | Landscape / portrait | 29.8 MB / 58.6 MB | 2.6 MB / 6.3 MB |
Resizing down doesn't make a photo light if you save it as PNG. The PNG output was larger than the original 1.4 MB landscape JPG for 111 of the 143 presets, and larger than the 4.7 MB portrait JPG for 58. The JPG outputs were smaller than the original in all but five cases, and those five are presets bigger than the photo itself, like the 7680 × 4320 wallpaper and the poster. Seven presets have a side longer than the photo's 4,032 px, so the photo is enlarged there and can't gain real detail.
Which files the platforms would refuse
For 53 of the 143 presets, the platform states a numeric upload limit on its own help or developer pages (collected in our platform rules review). We compared both PNG and JPG results against those limits. That gave 106 PNG results, of which 14 PNGs, on 8 presets, were over the limit. Every JPG fitted except the two for the Snapchat filter preset.
| Preset | Published limit | PNG landscape / portrait | JPG landscape / portrait |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluesky banner 3000 × 1000 | 1,000,000 bytes | 5.2 MB / 6.3 MB ✗ | 523 KB / 774 KB |
| Walmart product 2200 × 2200 | 5 MB | 6.5 MB / 10.0 MB ✗ | 625 KB / 1.4 MB |
| GitHub social preview 1280 × 640 | Under 1 MB | 1.6 MB / 2.0 MB ✗ | 157 KB / 264 KB |
| SoundCloud banner 2480 × 520 | 2 MB | 2.4 MB / 2.8 MB ✗ | 256 KB / 368 KB |
| YouTube Shorts cover 1080 × 1920 | 2 MB on mobile (50 MB on desktop) | 3.0 MB / 4.5 MB ✗ | 297 KB / 601 KB |
| YouTube thumbnail 1280 × 720 | 2 MB on mobile (50 MB on desktop) | 1.8 MB / 2.2 MB ✗ (portrait) | 167 KB / 291 KB |
| YouTube banner 2560 × 1440 | 6 MB | 5.8 MB / 7.8 MB ✗ (portrait) | 571 KB / 1.0 MB |
| Snapchat filter 1080 × 2340 | Under 300 KB, PNG | 3.4 MB / 5.7 MB ✗ | 327 KB / 845 KB ✗ |
The Snapchat row is a special case. Snapchat asks for filters to be PNG files with a transparent background, under 300 KB. That is artwork, not a photo, so neither format is suitable for a full-frame photo there. A few other limits are about format rather than size. Images posted through the Instagram API must be JPEG, the TikTok Content Posting API takes only WebP or JPEG, and Spotify's API wants playlist covers as Base64 JPEG in a request of at most 256 KB. Our two Spotify JPGs (66 KB and 132 KB) fit even after Base64 adds about a third. Two platforms publish advice rather than a limit. Facebook says a Page cover loads fastest as a JPG under 100 KB (our landscape JPG was 62 KB, the portrait one 105 KB), and Etsy warns that images over 1 MB may not finish uploading on slow connections (our Etsy PNGs were 5.6 MB and 8.4 MB, the JPGs 540 KB and 1.2 MB).
What to do with this
- Pick a photo that already has the target shape. For stories, Pins and phone wallpapers, start from a portrait photo. For thumbnails, banners and link previews, start from a landscape one. That choice alone moves a 9:16 crop from 42% to 75% of the photo.
- For banners of 3:1 and wider, plan the shot. No 4:3 photo survives a 4:1 crop with much left. Use a wide or panoramic shot, or frame a photo with plenty of empty space above and below the subject.
- Check where the crop lands before you download. If the subject isn't in the middle, crop it yourself with Aspect Ratio Crop or Crop Image.
- Choose JPG for photos and PNG for graphics. For a photo, the JPG was 7 to 10 times smaller in our test and fitted every limit except Snapchat's. Keep PNG for logos, text and screenshots, or when the platform asks for it. If a file still needs to shrink, the image compressor or a target-size tool such as compress to 1 MB will get it under a limit.
- For several sizes from one photo, Bulk Image Resize runs the same job across many files.
How we tested
On 24 October 2026 we ran every one of the 143 preset pages under /resize/ against a local production build of the site. We used a script in Chromium driven by Playwright 1.64.1 on an Apple M2 Mac. The process is described on our testing page. For each page the script uploaded a photo, waited for the result, saved the default output (crop to fill, PNG), then switched to JPG (smaller) and saved that too. That gave 286 PNG and 286 JPG files. The two photos are phone14 (landscape 4032 × 3024, 1.4 MB JPG) and phone19 (portrait 3024 × 4032, 4.7 MB JPG) from our test set of iPhone photos from Wikimedia Commons.
For each file we recorded the output dimensions (all 286 matched the preset exactly), the size in bytes, and the share of the original photo kept by the crop. Platform limits come only from the platform's own help centre, developer documentation or ads guide, each checked on 24 October 2026. Third-party size guides were not used.
Limitations: we tested one landscape and one portrait photo, both 4:3. The crop shares apply to any 4:3 photo, but file sizes depend on the scene. A busy street weighs more than a clear sky. Phones that shoot 16:9 or 3:2 will give different crop shares. We didn't upload the files to any platform, so the limit comparison uses each platform's published figures, not the result of a real upload.