A very wide frame
The 3:1 ratio of the X header is much wider than any photo your camera produces. A 4:3 phone photo cropped to 3:1 keeps only a horizontal band through the middle, a little over 40% of the original height. That works brilliantly for horizons, skylines, mountain ranges and patterns, and poorly for portraits or tall subjects. If your image has an important element near the top or bottom, crop it manually first with the crop tool using a free ratio, then resize here.
Safe areas
Your profile photo sits over the lower-left part of the header, and the header is shown at different heights on phones, tablets and desktops, so the top and bottom edges may be trimmed. As a rule of thumb, keep text and key details within the middle 1500 × 360 pixels, and avoid the bottom-left quarter entirely.
Crop or pad?
- Crop to fill: best for photographic banners such as landscapes, textures and team photos taken wide.
- Fit and pad: best for logos, artwork or a wordmark on a solid brand colour. Choose the background colour so the padding looks intentional.
Quality tips
Start from the largest image you have. A header is wide, and a small source image stretched to 1500 pixels will look soft. For photos, JPG at quality 90 gives a good balance; for designs with text or flat colours, PNG avoids compression smudges around letters. The output is far below the 5 MB limit in either case.
How it works
The image is decoded in a background Web Worker, rotated according to EXIF data, the centred 3:1 region is selected, and it is resampled to exactly 1500 × 500 with the Lanczos3 filter. Your image is never uploaded.
Related banners: 1584 × 396 for LinkedIn, and the social media resizer for Facebook covers and YouTube banners.