How Much of Your Image Each Platform Actually Shows (2026 Data)
CropDenOnly 17.7% of a YouTube banner shows on every device; a square Instagram post loses 25% on the grid. 16 formats ranked by how much survives crops and app overlays.
Every platform shows less of your image than you upload. Across 16 common formats, the share that survives every crop and stays clear of app buttons ranges from 17.7% for a YouTube banner to 98.8% for a YouTube video thumbnail. The worst offenders are wide banners shown on phones and landscape photos on Instagram's profile grid.
The numbers below come from the crop and overlay boxes drawn on CropDen's size pages, so you can check any of them on your own image.
The ranking
"Clear" means the part of the upload that every device shows and that no platform interface covers. Rows marked approx. include overlays measured from the apps rather than published by the platform.
| Format | Upload size | Clear area | What takes the rest |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube channel banner | 2560 × 1440 | 17.7% | Desktop, tablet and phone each show a narrower strip; only 1546 × 423 is shown everywhere |
| Instagram landscape post | 1080 × 566 | 39.3% | The 3:4 profile grid shows only the middle 424 px |
| Facebook cover photo | 851 × 315 | 65.8% | Phones show only the middle 560 px |
| TikTok video or photo slide | 1080 × 1920 | 69.2% approx. | Top tabs, the right-hand button column, caption and sound |
| Instagram story | 1080 × 1920 | 69.3% approx. | Profile and progress bar on top, reply bar at the bottom |
| X (Twitter) header | 1500 × 500 | 72.8% approx. | Top and bottom strips some screens cut, plus the profile photo |
| Facebook story | 1080 × 1920 | 74% approx. | About 250 px at the top and bottom |
| Instagram square post | 1080 × 1080 | 75% | The 3:4 grid hides 135 px on each side |
| Instagram Reel cover | 1080 × 1920 | 75% | The grid shows only the middle 1080 × 1440 |
| Etsy listing photo | 3000 × 2250 | 75% approx. | Search results can show a square crop |
| Snapchat story | 1080 × 1920 | 84.3% approx. | About 150 px at the top and bottom |
| Discord profile banner | 600 × 240 | 90.1% approx. | The avatar circle in the lower left |
| Discord server banner | 960 × 540 | 91.2% approx. | The server name across the top |
| LinkedIn profile background | 1584 × 396 | 92% approx. | The profile photo in the lower left |
| Instagram portrait post | 1080 × 1350 | 93.7% | The 3:4 grid trims about 34 px per side |
| YouTube video thumbnail | 3840 × 2160 or 1280 × 720 | 98.8% approx. | The duration badge in the corner |
A 3:4 Instagram post (1080 × 1440) isn't in the table because nothing is cropped on the grid: 100% is clear there.
What the numbers mean for your design
Wide banners are designed for the smallest screen. A YouTube banner is really a 1546 × 423 design surrounded by background. Put the channel name, logo and any text in that strip, and fill the rest with something that can disappear. The same logic gives you 560 px of a Facebook cover on phones.
On Instagram, shape decides how much the grid keeps. The grid switched to 3:4 tiles in 2025, so the old favorite, the square, now loses a quarter of its width there. A 4:5 portrait loses only 6%, and a 3:4 post loses nothing. Landscape posts are the worst case: less than 40% shows on the grid.
Vertical video loses a third to the interface. TikTok and Instagram stories both cover roughly 31% of the frame with buttons and captions, mostly the bottom 340 to 360 px. Keep faces and text in the middle band, and the right edge clear on TikTok.
Profile photos cost banners less than it looks. The circles on LinkedIn and Discord banners cover only 8 to 10% of the area, but they sit exactly where people tend to put a name. Put text on the right half and the numbers stop mattering.
How we measured
Each CropDen size page draws the platform's crops and overlays on your image as boxes. For this article we took every format that has at least one such box and computed, on a fine grid of sample points, the share of the image that is inside the smallest crop every device applies and outside every overlay.
- Published boxes come from platform documentation. YouTube's banner guidelines, for example, give the text-and-logo safe area as 1235 × 338 px at the 2048 × 1152 minimum upload, which is 1546 × 423 px at the recommended 2560 × 1440.
- Measured boxes, such as Instagram's reply bar or LinkedIn's profile photo, were measured from the live apps in October 2026. They shift between app versions and phones, so treat those rows as close estimates.
- Formats without any crop or overlay, such as a Pinterest pin or a passport photo, are left out: they show 100%.
The boxes behind every row are on the social media image sizes cheat sheet and the individual pages, such as the YouTube banner, Instagram post and Facebook cover sizes. We re-check them at least once a quarter.
