Facebook profile picture size

Meta’s help centre describes a Facebook Page’s profile picture at three display sizes: 176 × 176 pixels on a computer, 196 × 196 on a smartphone and 36 × 36 on most feature phones. It gives a single upload size for best quality, 320 pixels wide by 320 tall, and says the picture is cropped to a circle.

Those figures are written for Pages. For a personal profile, the only figure we found in Meta’s help centre is in its article on editing the profile picture thumbnail: “the minimum photo size for a profile picture is 180 px by 60 px”. That is a floor, far below the 320 pixels it recommends for Pages. Third-party guides including Sprout Social and Hootsuite list one 320 × 320 size for any Facebook profile picture, displayed at 176 × 176 on desktop and 196 × 196 on smartphones. One square file serves both.

A circle drawn inside a square leaves out about 21% of it, all from the four corners. The biggest square that fits wholly inside the circle is about 71% as wide as the file. On a 320 × 320 upload that is the middle 226 × 226 pixels, a margin of roughly 47 pixels on every side, and it is where faces, initials and logo marks belong.

Wide logos are the hard case. A wordmark three times wider than it is tall can be at most about 300 × 100 pixels inside a 320-pixel circle. At the 176 pixels Meta gives for computers it becomes about 167 × 56, and on a feature phone, where the picture is 36 pixels across, the whole word is about 11 pixels tall.

Tip: Use the symbol or initials from your logo instead of the full name. Your name or Page name sits next to the picture almost everywhere it appears, so the picture doesn’t need to spell it out.

Most profile pictures start as a camera photo, not a square. When you upload one, Facebook lets you position it inside the circle before saving. Zooming in at that step costs detail: if the circle ends up covering a 300-pixel-wide patch of a 1,200-pixel photo, the finished picture is only about 300 pixels across, short of the 320 Meta recommends.

• Crop to a square yourself first, with the face or logo in the centre, so the step on Facebook needs little or no adjusting.
• Frame a portrait as head and shoulders. The circle trims the corners, where the shoulders usually are, and that looks natural.
• Pick a plain or blurred background. At thumbnail size a busy scene behind a face turns into noise.
• Start from the original photo rather than a screenshot or a copy saved from Facebook, which has already been compressed at least once.

1. Set up a square canvas of 320 × 320 pixels, or a larger square such as 1080 × 1080 if you want a sharp master copy.
2. Keep the mark inside the middle 70% of the width and height so the circle never touches it.
3. Fill the background with a solid colour instead of leaving it transparent, so you decide what shows behind the mark.
4. Save a logo or lettering as a PNG, as Meta suggests for profile pictures with a logo or text, and a photo as a high-quality JPG.
5. After uploading, look at the picture beside one of your posts or comments, where it is far smaller than on the profile itself.

The same picture represents a Page in Messenger conversations, in search results and next to every post and comment it makes, so test the small views, not just the profile header.

Instagram’s Help Center says that once your Facebook profile and your Instagram account are in the same Accounts Center, you can choose to sync your profile picture, so changing it in one app changes it in the other. The picture can be synced only if your name is synced too, and you can unsync later.

The square sizes are compatible. Both apps crop to a circle, and Instagram shows the picture smaller than Facebook does, at about 110 pixels according to Hootsuite, so a 320 × 320 file that looks good on Facebook is plenty there.