You set a cover photo on desktop, centre the text, everything looks deliberate. Then you open the page on your phone and the top of everyone's head is gone, or the tagline now ends mid-word. Facebook did not resize your cover for mobile — it re-cropped it.

That one fact explains every mangled cover photo, and it is why the answer to "what size should a Facebook cover be" has two parts: the size to upload, and the area you are actually allowed to use.

The same image, cropped two ways

Facebook displays the cover as a wide, short letterbox on desktop and a narrower, taller window on mobile — Facebook's own help page describes the two renditions. Practically:

  • Desktop shows a wide strip: generous width, but the top and bottom of your image are shaved off.
  • Mobile shows a taller, narrower crop: more vertical room, but the left and right edges are cut.

Nothing in the corners survives both. The only region guaranteed to appear everywhere is the centre — roughly the middle of the image both horizontally and vertically. That centre zone is the safe area, and the rule that follows is simple: faces, logos and any text live in the middle; the outer edges carry only background you can afford to lose.

Why upload at 1,640 × 924

The display sizes are modest, but uploading at exactly display size hands Facebook a small file to re-compress even smaller. Uploading at double resolution — 1,640 × 924 pixels is the widely used figure — keeps text and edges crisp after Facebook's compression pass, the same double-resolution logic that applies to every platform in the social media image sizes guide.

The Facebook cover preset in the image resizer exports that size in one step: drop your image, position the crop so the subject sits centred, download. If you are building from a design tool instead, export at those dimensions and keep the composition centred yourself — the general resizer handles any custom size.

Two export notes:

  • JPG at high quality is right for photographic covers. For a flat graphic cover with text, PNG keeps the edges cleaner going in — Facebook re-encodes either way, so start sharp.
  • Do not pre-compress hard. Feeding an already-compressed file into Facebook's compression stacks two rounds of damage. Export clean and let their pipeline be the only lossy step; if the file is unreasonably heavy, one gentle pass in the image compressor is plenty.

Designing a cover that survives

  • Put nothing that matters in the outer fifth on any side. Phone crop eats the sides, desktop crop eats the top and bottom — the corners are decoration only.
  • Check both renditions before calling it done. Load the page on a phone after setting the cover; it takes ten seconds and catches the beheaded-face problem immediately.
  • Remember the overlays. The page's profile picture and buttons sit over the lower-left region of the cover on most layouts, so anchor key content centre-right rather than bottom-left.
  • Text: fewer, bigger words. The same rule as every social crop — a short phrase that reads at a glance beats a sentence that only works at desktop width.

A page's cover is also separate from the image shown when the page is shared in a post — that preview comes from Open Graph tags, which you can test with the Facebook link preview generator.

Groups, events and profiles

Groups, events and personal profiles each crop the cover differently, and the layouts shift over time. The constant is the rule above: keep faces and text in the central safe area, leave the corners expendable, and check the phone rendition before you sign off. The Facebook cover preset in the image resizer handles the size and the centring in one step, and the current sizes for the other platforms are in the image sizes guide.