Make a Facebook cover collage
The wide crop, with the parts mobile hides and the profile photo covers marked out.
Drop photos here, or paste from your clipboard
Examples
The details
| Canvas | 1702 × 630 — 2× of 851 × 315, so it stays sharp on a retina screen |
|---|---|
| Mobile crop | centre 16:9 — the sides are cut off on a phone |
| Profile photo overlap | bottom left, about 340 × 340 px — at 2× |
| Safe area | centre 1200 × 500 px — visible on both desktop and mobile |
| Photos that suit 2.7:1 | 3 to 6 — a wide strip wants a single row |
| Format | JPG at 90 or PNG — Facebook re-encodes either |
How it works
- Add your photos.
- Keep faces out of the bottom-left corner and the outer edges.
- Download at 1702 × 630.
A Facebook cover is an unusually hostile shape: 2.7:1, wider than a cinema screen, and two parts of it are obscured. On a phone the sides are cropped away and only the centre 16:9 survives; on desktop the profile photo sits over the bottom-left corner. Between them they remove a good third of the image, and it is always the third people put a face in.
This page marks both. The centre area that survives the mobile crop is drawn on the canvas, as is the square the profile photo occupies. Photographs can extend under both — it looks better than a hard edge — but the subject of each photograph should be inside the safe region, and nothing you need read should be in the bottom-left corner.
The canvas here is 1702 × 630, which is twice Facebook's stated 851 × 315. The doubling is deliberate: the smaller size is soft on any modern screen, and Facebook accepts and downsamples the larger one cleanly. Anything beyond 2× is wasted, because the platform re-encodes it anyway.
For the arrangement, a strip this wide wants a single row. Three to six photographs side by side reads as a cover; a grid of nine at 630 pixels tall gives rows about 200 pixels high, which is not enough for anything. If one photograph is the point, giving it half the width and dividing the rest works better than equal cells.
One practical point about updating a cover: Facebook keeps the previous ones in an album, and they stay visible unless you delete them. If the collage includes photographs of other people, that is worth knowing before you change it half a dozen times to get the crop right — each attempt is kept.
As everywhere here, nothing leaves your device and the exported file carries no metadata — which for a cover photo, visible to everyone, is worth more than usual.
Questions
What size is a Facebook cover photo?
851 × 315 as stated by Facebook, but export at 1702 × 630 — twice that — so it is not soft on a modern screen. Facebook downsamples it cleanly.
Why is my cover cropped on my phone?
Mobile shows only the centre 16:9 of the cover, cutting the sides. That area is marked on the canvas here.
Where does the profile photo sit?
Over the bottom-left corner on desktop, about 340 × 340 pixels at 2× scale. Keep faces and text out of it.
How many photos fit in a cover collage?
Three to six in a single row. The canvas is only 630 pixels tall, so a grid leaves rows too short to see anything in.
JPG or PNG?
Either — Facebook re-encodes both. JPG at quality 90 is the smaller file and shows no difference for photographs.