Best aspect ratios for screenshots on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Product Hunt

A great screenshot in the wrong shape is just cropped. Different feeds crop differently — what looks centered in your editor can lose the call to action, the toolbar, or the entire hero on someone else’s phone. Composing to the platform’s aspect ratio before you hit export is the cheapest possible upgrade to your distribution.

Below is a single early-2026 reference table you can paste into a note, keep open while shipping, and never have to Google again.

The cheat sheet

Bookmark this — it covers 95 % of what indie founders post.

Heuristics in plain English:

• 1.91:1 (a.k.a. 1200 × 630) — the universal OG card. If you only design one image, design this one.
• 16:9 — best for app UI, dashboards, code snippets and anything with horizontal layout.
• 1:1 — safe everywhere, especially when you don’t know which feed it’ll land in.
• 4:5 portrait — quietly the best-performing ratio on Instagram and Threads because it occupies the most vertical screen real estate without being a Story.
• 9:16 — Stories, Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Keep the important parts inside the central 80 % of the canvas.

X (Twitter)

The X timeline crops tall images. Posts an image at 9:16 and the preview shows only the top third — people see your toolbar and miss the actual product. Stick to 16:9 for in-feed screenshots and 1.91:1 when you’re sharing a link card from a blog post or landing page.

If you absolutely have to post a portrait shot, X will at least let people tap to see the full image — but the impression count is on the cropped preview, so design the top to stand on its own.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the strictest about OG cards: post a link from your blog and it expects exactly 1200 × 630 (1.91:1). Anything else gets letterboxed or padded with white space that screams “untuned image.”

For native posts (no link), square (1:1) is the safest. Portrait (4:5) works for carousel-style multi-image posts but gets aggressively cropped to a roughly 1.2:1 thumbnail on mobile. Don’t put text near the top or bottom edges.

Instagram

Instagram is three feeds in a trench coat:

• Feed — supports 1.91:1, 1:1 and 4:5. Always export at 4:5 if you want the post to occupy the most screen on a phone.
• Profile grid — auto-crops everything to 1:1. If a post must read well in the grid, make sure the subject sits in the center square of whatever ratio you chose.
• Stories / Reels — 9:16, full screen. Mind the safe zone: the top 250 px and bottom 250 px are reserved for the username, time and reply UI on most phones.

Product Hunt

The gallery is the part that converts upvotes into traffic, so it’s worth tuning carefully. The first image — the “hero” — does most of the work. Make it a 3:2 or 16:9 cinematic shot of the product in action, not a logo.

• Thumbnail (1:1) — keep it bold, centered and readable at 80 px. A small mark on a strong background beats a tiny screenshot every time.
• Gallery hero (3:2) — show the product solving the problem. UI screenshots beat marketing collages.
• Gallery detail (16:9) — close-ups, feature shots, animated GIFs. Don’t exceed 5 MB for GIFs or they get re-encoded.

Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon

These three behave roughly like X but with different defaults. Threads borrows Instagram’s aesthetic (1:1 and 4:5 win), Bluesky follows the OG card spec almost exactly (1.91:1), and Mastodon is instance-dependent but renders 16:9 reliably across all of them. When in doubt, export the same image at 1.91:1 and 1:1 and post separately.

Export resolution: always 2×, sometimes 3×

Aspect ratio fixes the shape; pixel density fixes the sharpness. Every ratio in the table above lists the 2× export size — that’s what you want for retina screens. Bumping to 3× is worth it for hero images on landing pages and Product Hunt galleries, where every pixel counts.

For images bigger than ~2400 × 1600 you start hitting platform compression artifacts anyway, so going beyond 3× rarely helps.

One quick gotcha: safe zones

Aspect ratio matters most because of safe zones — the parts of the image that never get cropped. As a rule of thumb:

• Keep the subject inside the central 80 % of the canvas.
• Keep any text inside the central 70 %.
• Test the post on mobile before mass-sharing — what you see in a desktop composer is rarely what your audience sees.