Make a Facebook cover photo that survives the crop

We read the Facebook Help Centre article “Facebook Page profile picture and cover photo dimensions” (facebook.com/help/125379114252045) on 7 October 2026. It says a cover photo must be at least 400 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall, and loads fastest as an sRGB JPG that is 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. On computers it describes the cover as left-aligned with a full bleed at a 16:9 aspect ratio. On mobile devices it is left-aligned with a full bleed at a 2.4:1 aspect ratio, and the profile picture overlaps the cover by approximately 40 pixels. Meta also warns that the left-hand side of the cover is partially covered by the profile picture and that the cover may be cropped and resized to fit different screens.

Meta gives the shapes but not which part of a 851 × 315 file each screen keeps. The guides assume the full height is kept and the width is trimmed to the shape, measured in file pixels, and you can pick which side loses width. Treat them as a way to plan, then look at the real cover on a phone and a computer after you save it. They are labelled as guesses in the tool for that reason.

• Put the headline in the middle. If a 16:9 screen keeps the full height of an 851 × 315 file, it can show only about 560 of the 851 pixels of width, so a headline near either edge is the first thing to go.
• Keep faces and logos out of the lower left, where the profile picture sits. Meta puts the overlap at about 40 pixels on mobile; some guides say much more, so the overlap slider goes up to 160.
• Make lettering large. On a phone the cover is a short band, so as a rule of thumb text under about 24 px at this size gets hard to read.
• Fill the outer edges with something you can afford to lose: sky, a plain colour or a soft texture.
• Use PNG for a cover that is mostly a logo or text. Meta says a PNG may give a better result there, while a photo does best as a JPG.

Tip: If the tool shows a warning, drag the text toward the centre or narrow the text box. The warning is checked against whichever crop guides and picture settings you have chosen.

Meta names 100 KB as the size that loads fastest; it does not call it a limit. At 851 × 315 the Squeeze under 100 KB option tries different JPEG quality levels and keeps the best one that fits. If a busy photo cannot fit even at low quality, the tool says so and saves the smallest it can make.

On a dense phone screen an 851-pixel image can look slightly soft. The 1702 × 630 option doubles the pixels and keeps the same shape, at the cost of a bigger file, so the 100 KB squeeze is not offered there. The choice is yours; Meta recommends the smaller size.

Page profile pictures are a separate image. Meta’s article says a Page picture shows at 176 × 176 pixels on computers and 196 × 196 on smartphones, cropped to a circle, and should be 320 × 320. Our profile picture maker saves a square for it.