TikTok Image & Video Sizes Guide (2026): Complete Dimensions for Videos, Profile Pictures, Ads & Covers

TikTok is the simplest platform in this series in one way and the strictest in another. Simple, because almost everything on it, videos, Stories, photo carousels, covers and ads, lives on the same 1080×1920 vertical canvas. Strict, because that canvas is displayed full screen with interface elements drawn on top of it, so sizing mistakes that other platforms forgive with a polite crop show up on TikTok as text hidden under buttons, subjects pushed off screen, and blurry re-encodes.

This guide covers every TikTok dimension that matters in 2026: video specs including resolution, frame rate and bitrate, profile pictures, covers, carousels, TikTok Shop, every ad format, and the safe zones that decide whether your content survives the interface. As with the rest of this series, the workflow parts are measured with real files: I prepared TikTok-ready images with the free tools on this site and recorded the numbers at each step, including a 5.83 MB crop becoming a 263 KB upload.

Why TikTok image and video sizes matter

On most platforms a sizing mistake costs you a crop. On TikTok it costs more, for one structural reason: TikTok is a full-screen, single-item feed. Your content is the entire display, the interface floats on top of it, and viewers judge it in under a second. The practical consequences:

• Better video quality. TikTok re-encodes every upload. A clean 1080×1920 H.264 file at a healthy bitrate gives the re-encoder good input and survives looking close to your export. A low-bitrate or wrongly sized file gets compressed twice and looks it.
• No cropping or bars. A 9:16 upload fills the screen edge to edge. Anything else plays boxed between black or blurred bars, and TikTok may zoom it to fill, cropping the edges without asking.
• Better engagement and watch time. Full-screen content simply occupies more attention than a letterboxed rectangle floating in the middle of the display. Nothing mystical about it: screen area is attention, and 9:16 buys all of it.
• Professional appearance. Bars, soft focus from upscaling, and captions hidden behind the like button are the visual signature of a repost account. Native-format content reads as intentional.

TikTok video size

The complete video spec sheet for 2026:

Recommended resolution is exactly 1080×1920. Uploading 4K does not hurt, but TikTok delivers video at up to 1080p, so the extra pixels are re-encoded away; exporting 4K for TikTok mostly buys you longer upload times. Uploading below 1080, on the other hand, visibly costs sharpness because the player scales it up to fill the screen.

Supported formats: MP4 and MOV cover the normal upload paths, with H.264 the safe codec everywhere. The ads platform additionally accepts AVI and MPEG, and you may see WebM mentioned around the web uploader, but support for it is inconsistent enough that the practical rule is simple: export H.264 MP4 and it works in every TikTok context that exists.

File size limits depend on where you upload from: roughly 72 MB through the Android app, 287.6 MB through the iOS app, and up to 4 GB through tiktok.com in a browser. If a long or high-bitrate video is refused by the app, the web uploader is the escape hatch.

Frame rate: 30 fps is the platform standard and what most phones shoot. 60 fps is worth exporting for gameplay, sports and fast camera movement; anything between 23 and 60 is accepted.

Bitrate is the setting that quietly decides upload quality. Too low and your export is already mushy before TikTok compresses it again; absurdly high and you gain nothing visible while multiplying file size. Around 5 Mbps for 1080p at 30 fps, and 8 to 10 Mbps at 60 fps, is the range that survives TikTok's re-encode about as well as anything can.

Best TikTok aspect ratio

Three ratios are accepted, and they are not equal:

• 9:16 fills the screen completely. This is the native format and the right answer in almost every case.
• 1:1 plays centered with large empty bands above and below. Acceptable for reposting square content in a pinch, but it surrenders about 40 percent of the screen.
• 16:9 plays as a thin letterboxed strip, or gets zoom-cropped to fill, losing both edges. Landscape footage is better recut: crop to the vertical slice that matters, or stack the wide shot over a blurred fill.

Which performs best? 9:16, and not by a little. Full-screen content holds attention longer, and watch time is the main currency of TikTok's recommendation system. The honest mechanism is worth restating: vertical does not get an algorithmic bonus for being vertical; it simply occupies the whole display, and everything downstream follows from that. If your source is landscape, the image cropper's 9:16 preset shows exactly which vertical slice of the frame survives, which is a fast way to storyboard a recut before you open a video editor.

TikTok profile picture size

TikTok's formal minimum is a comically small 20×20 pixels, with 200×200 the recommended baseline. Upload larger anyway: a square around 1000×1000 stays sharp on high-DPI phone screens, and TikTok downsizes cleanly.

• Safe area: the image displays as a circle, so the corners of your square never appear. Center the face or logo and keep it comfortably inside the circular region.
• PNG vs JPG: for a photo, JPG at quality 85 is smaller and looks identical. For a logo or graphic with hard edges and flat color, PNG keeps the mark crisp. Either uploads fine.
• The picture renders tiny in feeds and comments, so the profile-picture rule from every other platform applies double on TikTok: one clear subject on a clean background. If your logo sits on a busy photo, cut it out with the background remover and set it on a flat brand color; and the profile picture cropper previews the circular mask live while you position it.

TikTok thumbnail (cover) size

Covers are chosen when you post: either a frame from the video or, on photo posts, one of the images, optionally with text added in the app. The cover is a full 1080×1920 canvas, but it is almost never seen at that size. It lives on your profile grid as a center-cropped vertical tile, roughly the middle three-quarters of the canvas, expanding to full size only when tapped.

Design rules that follow from the crop:

• Put title text in the upper-middle of the frame, inside the central region. Text near the canvas top or bottom is cut off in the grid; text at the very bottom also collides with the feed interface.
• Make covers consistent. The grid is your channel's storefront, and series with matching cover styles visibly outperform random frames when someone lands on your profile deciding whether to follow.
• Test at thumbnail size. Shrink the cover to about 170 pixels wide; if the text is not readable there, it is not readable on your grid.

TikTok Story size

Stories use the standard 1080×1920 canvas and disappear after 24 hours. The same safe zones as regular videos apply, with the interface overlays if anything slightly heavier. There is no separate spec to remember: a correctly sized TikTok video or photo is a correctly sized Story, and the same file cross-posts to Instagram or Facebook Stories unchanged, which makes 1080×1920 the single most reusable canvas in social media.

TikTok carousel photo size

Photo mode posts (carousels) support up to 35 images that viewers swipe through, each ideally 1080×1920. Square 1:1 images are accepted and display with bands, exactly like square video. The whole post is capped at around 500 MB, which sounds enormous until you remember phone photos run several megabytes each; 35 originals can genuinely brush against it.

Preparing a carousel is a batch job, and this is where the pipeline tools earn their keep. I ran the full photo-mode prep as one pass on the image compressor: drop the photo, add a resize step set to exact 1080×1920, set a 500 KB target with JPG output, and run. My 5.83 MB test image came back at 455.6 KB with quality 94, resized and compressed in one operation:

TikTok slideshow image size

Slideshows, the auto-advancing photo templates TikTok offers in the camera flow with synced music, use the same sizing as carousels: 1080×1920 per image. The difference is presentation, not specs; TikTok animates the transitions and timing for you. Because slideshow images display briefly, they reward bold, simple frames over detailed ones, and mixed image shapes look especially scrappy when the template snaps between them, so size the whole set identically before uploading.

TikTok Shop product image size

TikTok Shop steps outside the vertical canvas: product images are square, 1:1, at least 800×800 pixels, on a clean background, as JPG or PNG. The first image is the one buyers see in search grids and product cards, so it carries the listing:

• Fill the frame with the product; grid tiles are small.
• A white or single-color background is the platform convention and reads as professional. The background remover plus a flat fill gets a phone photo most of the way there.
• Keep files to a couple of megabytes; giant uploads slow the listing editor and gain nothing.

TikTok ad sizes

Ad formats reuse the organic canvas with stricter minimums:

Two ad-specific notes. First, the 516 kbps bitrate minimum is enforced at review time and is the most common technical rejection for ads exported by online template tools at aggressive compression; any normal editor export clears it by a mile. Second, Spark Ads are the format that makes organic sizing discipline pay twice: a correctly built 9:16 post can be boosted as-is, while a letterboxed one becomes a letterboxed ad.

TikTok LIVE thumbnail size

LIVE cover images are square, and a 1080×1080 upload is comfortably sharp everywhere the cover appears (the LIVE tab grid, share cards, and the pre-join preview). The square gets cropped slightly differently across surfaces, so the same center-safe rule applies: subject and any text in the middle, margins treated as expendable. A face plus three or four large words consistently beats a busy scene at LIVE-tab tile size.

Safe zones

TikTok draws its entire interface on top of your 1080×1920 content, and the overlays are substantial:

• Top ~120 px: the status bar plus the Following / For You tabs and search.
• Right ~150 px: the action rail: your avatar, like, comment, favorite and share buttons stacked down the edge. This is the overlay people forget, and it eats right-aligned text.
• Bottom ~250 px: username, caption, sound attribution, and on many surfaces the follow prompt. Captions can extend higher when long, so critical content near the lower third is never fully safe.
• Comment and share moments: when a viewer opens comments, the video shrinks to the upper half of the screen, which is one more argument for keeping the subject centered rather than low.

The reliable composition: subject and text in the central column, nothing that matters in the outer margins, and the bottom quarter treated as caption territory from the start.

Supported image formats

• JPG: the default for photos, carousels and Shop images. Quality 85 in sRGB is the export that behaves everywhere.
• PNG: accepted, and right for graphics, text slides and logos where edge crispness matters.
• WebP: not accepted for upload, and the most common format failure because AI tools and websites hand out WebP by default now. The fix is a one-step conversion, measured below.
• HEIC: iPhone captures convert automatically during upload; if you need the JPG version for editing elsewhere, the HEIC to JPG converter does it in the browser.

Here is the WebP fix with real numbers. I took an 833.1 KB WebP photo (4000×3000) and ran it through the image converter with JPG output. The result was a 1.34 MB JPG, and yes, it got larger: WebP genuinely compresses better than JPG, which is exactly why the web serves it. The point of the conversion is not size, it is that TikTok accepts the result:

Going the other direction, when you want efficient WebP versions of your TikTok graphics for your own website, the WebP converter handles that, and the JPG to PNG / PNG to JPG pair covers the remaining swaps.

Supported video formats

• MP4 (H.264): the universal answer. Works in the app, on the web uploader and in Ads Manager.
• MOV: equally accepted; it is what iPhones produce natively.
• AVI and MPEG: accepted by the ads platform specifically.
• WebM: inconsistently supported; do not build a workflow on it.

Codec matters more than container: H.264 video with AAC audio inside an MP4 is the combination every TikTok surface understands. H.265/HEVC uploads generally work from phones but add a transcode step; when exporting from an editor, H.264 removes the variable.

File size limits

The practical read: images never come near their limits if sized correctly (my finished 1080×1920 test image was 263 KB), and video limits only bite on Android, where a long 60 fps export can pass 72 MB. Export at a sane bitrate or upload from the web and the caps stop being relevant.

Best export settings

The target is identical in every editor: 1080×1920, H.264, AAC audio, 30 or 60 fps, 8 to 10 Mbps. Where to set it:

• Premiere Pro: Export > H.264, preset "Match Source" then set frame size 1080×1920, VBR 1-pass, target 8 Mbps (10 for 60 fps), AAC 256 kbps. Skip "Maximum render quality" unless downscaling from 4K.
• CapCut: Export at 1080p, 30 or 60 fps to match your project, quality High. CapCut's defaults are already TikTok-shaped; the main mistake available is exporting 4K for no benefit.
• DaVinci Resolve: Deliver page > MP4, H.264, 1080×1920, "Restrict to" around 10,000 kbps, AAC audio. Force sRGB/Rec.709 output if your project is in a wide gamut.
• Final Cut Pro: Share > Export File > Video codec H.264, or a custom Compressor setting at 1080×1920 with a 10 Mbps limit. Avoid ProRes masters as direct uploads; they are enormous and TikTok re-encodes them anyway.

Compression tips

For images, the compression rules from the rest of this series apply unchanged, and the numbers from my tests show the scale of the win:

1. Resize before compressing. My 9:16 crop exported as a 5.83 MB PNG; at 1080×1920 as a quality-85 JPG it was 263 KB, 96 percent smaller, with zero visible difference on a phone screen.
2. Use target mode for consistency. Feeding the compressor a 500 KB target with JPG output produced 455.6 KB at quality 94: it spends your whole budget on quality, which is what you want for carousel sets that should look uniform.
3. Do not recompress downloads. Images saved from TikTok, WhatsApp or Instagram have been through at least one aggressive compressor already. Always start from your original.

For video, compression happens at export: pick the bitrates above rather than compressing an already-exported file a second time. Re-encoding an H.264 export through another tool costs a generation of quality; if a video misses a file cap, re-export from the project at a lower bitrate instead.

Resize images for TikTok

The full prep, step by step, exactly as I measured it:

1. Open the image resizer and drop your cropped image (mine was the 1688×3000 crop from the step below, a 5.83 MB PNG).
2. Set mode to exact size and type 1080 and 1920.
3. Click Add step and add a Convert step set to JPG, so the resize and the format change happen together.
4. Run it. My file came back at 1080×1920 and 263 KB, 96 percent smaller, ready to upload:

Crop images for TikTok

Cropping comes first when the source is not vertical. The image cropper's 9:16 preset locks the ratio and lets you drag the window to choose the surviving slice. On my 4000×3000 test photo it selected a centered 1688×3000 region, and the X coordinate box let me nudge it off-center to keep the subject:

The crop-then-resize order matters: cropping after resizing throws away pixels you already paid for. And when composing the crop, keep the safe zones in mind so the subject lands in the central column rather than under the future position of the like button.

Convert images

The three conversions that come up in TikTok work, all running in the browser with nothing uploaded:

• PNG to JPG: for photographs exported as PNG; cuts file size by roughly 90 percent at identical-looking quality (measured repeatedly across this series).
• JPG to PNG: for graphics headed into further editing rounds, stopping additional JPG generation loss.
• WebP converter and the universal converter: WebP into JPG for TikTok uploads (measured above), or your finished graphics into WebP for your own site.

Common mistakes

Wrong aspect ratio. Square and landscape uploads surrender screen area to bars or get zoom-cropped. Thirty seconds with the 9:16 preset fixes it before upload.

Low resolution. Anything under 1080 wide gets stretched to fill the display and looks soft. Never upscale a small image to 1080×1920 either; the enlargement adds blur, not detail.

Huge file sizes. A 5.83 MB carousel image works, but 35 of them approach the post cap and upload slowly on mobile data, for zero visual benefit over the 455 KB version. Size first, then upload.

Text outside the safe area. The single most common TikTok-specific mistake: captions written onto the bottom quarter of the canvas, invisible under TikTok's own caption block, or right-aligned text under the action rail.

Poor thumbnails. A random mid-motion frame as the cover makes your profile grid look like static. Pick or design a cover with the title in the upper-middle, and keep the style consistent across the series.

WebP uploads bouncing. Files saved from websites and AI generators fail at upload time. Convert to JPG first; it is one step.

TikTok size cheat sheet

Conclusion

TikTok sizing reduces to one habit: build for the 1080×1920 vertical canvas and respect the interface that lives on top of it. Export video as H.264 MP4 around 8 Mbps, keep faces and text out of the top 120, right 150 and bottom 250 pixels, upload JPG or PNG images sized to the canvas, and give your profile a 1000×1000 square that survives the circle.

Every number in this guide came from running the free tools here: the cropper for the 9:16 slice, the resizer for exact pixels, the compressor for one-pass carousel prep, and the converters for TikTok's format rules, all in the browser with nothing uploaded to a server.

This is the fourth guide in the platform series: the Instagram guide covers the other vertical-first platform, the YouTube thumbnail guide covers 16:9 packaging, the Facebook guide covers the platform with the most slots, and the complete cheat sheet compresses every network into one table.