Photo collage sizes: the complete guide for Instagram, Facebook, wallpapers and print

A collage that looks perfect in the editor can arrive cropped on Instagram, blurry on a 16x20 print or hidden behind the clock on a phone lock screen. The fix is to pick the size before you place the first photo. Here is every size you will need, in pixels, with the zones to keep clear.

1. The short answer

If you only need one number, here it is for the most common destinations. Every size is in pixels, width by height, at the resolution each platform or printer actually uses.

In StudioCollage you do not type these numbers: you pick the destination and the canvas, the safe zones and the export size follow. The rest of this guide explains where each number comes from, so you know what to do when your case is not in the table.

2. Instagram: posts, the 3:4 grid, stories and reels

Instagram resizes every upload to 1080 pixels wide and compresses it once. A collage exported at exactly 1080 px wide keeps its sharpness; a larger one is downscaled (fine), a smaller one is stretched (visibly soft). Height depends on the format you choose.

The grid changed in January 2025. Profile thumbnails are now 3:4 rectangles instead of squares. Every post is cropped to 3:4 in the grid: a square collage loses a strip on the left and right, a 4:5 collage loses a sliver on each side, and a landscape collage loses a lot on the sides. The full image still opens when someone taps it. If you care about how your profile looks as a whole, build the collage at 4:5 and keep the important cells away from the left and right edges.

A square 2x2 grid and a 4:5 layout. On the 3:4 profile grid, the square one loses a strip on each side; the portrait one loses only a sliver.

Stories and reels are 1080 x 1920, but the app draws its own interface over the image: your name and the progress bar at the top, the reply box and buttons at the bottom. Keep faces and text out of roughly the top 250 pixels and the bottom 340 pixels. StudioCollage shades those two bands in the editor when you choose the story format, so a cell that lands there is visible at a glance. Story templates already respect them.

3. Facebook: cover photo, posts and events

The Facebook cover is the one size people get wrong most often, because it displays differently on a computer and on a phone.

The profile picture sits over the bottom left corner of the cover on most layouts. Do not put a face there. The Facebook cover templates draw the hidden corner and the mobile crop so you can see what survives.

4. Pinterest, YouTube, X, LinkedIn and TikTok

One collage rarely fits all of these. The practical rule: make the 4:5 version first (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn all take it), then switch the format in the editor for the 9:16 story and the 2:3 pin. StudioCollage rearranges the cells to the new proportions and keeps your photos and their framing, so the second and third versions take a minute each.

5. Phone, tablet and desktop wallpapers

A wallpaper collage has to match the screen exactly, or the phone will crop it. These are the screen resolutions of the most common devices in 2026.

On a phone lock screen, the clock takes the top quarter and notifications stack from the middle down. Put your favorite cell in the lower half and let the top be calm (sky, a wall, a plain color). On a home screen, app icons cover almost everything, so a wallpaper collage there works best as a soft, low-contrast pattern. The wallpaper presets in StudioCollage carry the exact sizes above; if your phone is not listed, type its resolution as a custom size.

6. Print sizes at 300 DPI

Printers think in inches and dots per inch, not pixels. The standard for a sharp photo print is 300 DPI: multiply the print size in inches by 300 to get the pixels you need. Below 200 DPI, edges start to look soft up close; for a large poster viewed from a few feet away, 150 DPI is acceptable.

Two more things printers need. Bleed: most print services trim about 3 mm (an eighth of an inch) around the edge, so do not put a border or a caption in the outer 36 pixels at 300 DPI. Color: export in sRGB, which is what phones produce and what every consumer printer expects. The print templates mark the trim margin so nothing important sits in it.

7. How to choose the size before you start

Start from the destination, not from the photos. Three questions settle it:

• Where will it be seen? Screen or paper. Paper needs far more pixels than any screen, so a print-size collage can be downscaled for social media, but not the other way round.
• Which ratio does that place impose? 4:5 for feeds, 9:16 for stories and phones, 2:3 for pins, 16:9 for video thumbnails and monitors, the paper ratio for prints. The ratio decides which layouts work: a 9:16 canvas wants stacked rows, a 16:9 canvas wants columns.
• How many photos? More cells means smaller cells. On a 1080-pixel-wide post, a 4x4 grid gives each photo about 265 pixels: fine for a phone screen, too small to show faces. Our guide on how many photos to put in a collage goes through the options.

If you want the collage in several places, make it at the largest size first and export the others from the same project. In StudioCollage, changing the format keeps every photo and its framing and simply rearranges the layout; for a print, choose the print preset so the export comes out at 300 DPI without any resizing step.

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