The Only Four Social Image Sizes You Need
Story, Reel, Feed, Square — plus a 3:2 for Airbnb. Export the right shape and the platform stops eating your sofa.
after · staged
before
Listing photos are wide. Phones and social feeds are tall. Every time you post a real estate photo without thinking about shape, a machine makes a crop decision on your behalf, and it makes it badly — because it doesn't know that the point of the frame is the island, the fireplace, or the view out the back.
This is the least glamorous thing in social media and it costs you more reach than your caption does. The fix takes five seconds if you export at the right size instead of letting the upload do it.
The four sizes
- Story — 9:16 (1080 × 1920). Instagram and Facebook stories. Full-screen vertical. The tallest, hungriest shape: a wide room photo dropped in here loses most of its width or floats in the middle of a colored background.
- Reel — 9:16 vertical video. Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. Same shape as story, different surface — this is where the algorithm actually pushes you to non-followers. Your before/after reveal reel belongs here.
- Feed — 4:5 (1080 × 1350). The tall in-feed post. This is the one most agents should use most of the time: it's the maximum vertical real estate Instagram allows in-feed, which means it physically pushes the next post off the screen. A square gives up 25% of that height for free.
- Square — 1:1 (1080 × 1080). Grid-safe, LinkedIn-safe, Facebook-safe, and the shape that survives being embedded anywhere. Use it when the same asset has to work in five places.
Plus one honorable mention: 3:2 landscape, the shape Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking want for a listing cover photo. It's also, conveniently, the native shape of a normal camera photo — see Airbnb listing photos and the hosts page.
What actually gets cropped
Take the backyard at the top of this page — a 3:2 frame with the sectional on the left, the dining set on the right, and string lights running across the top. Everything that makes it a place someone wants to be is at the edges.
- To 4:5: you lose the left and right edges. The sectional goes. You keep the table and the fence. Survivable, barely.
- To 1:1: more of both sides goes. Now the seating area is a corner of a photo mostly about paving.
- To 9:16: most of the width is gone. What's left is a narrow column through the middle of the yard — a fence, a shed, some sky. Both of the things you staged are outside the frame. This is the crop that ruins posts, and it's the one every story upload does by default.
Interiors fail the same way: a kitchen shot with the range on one side and the window on the other gets reduced to an island in a room you can't read.
The deeper problem is that a wide room photo is composed for width. The whole reason you shot at 16–24mm was to show how the space connects. Cropping to vertical undoes the composition on purpose. See wide-angle real estate photography for why the wide frame exists, and how to photograph a room for framing that survives a re-crop.
Export the shape. Don't crop it on upload.
Stylst's export presets render your finished photo directly at Story, Reel, Feed, Square, or Airbnb 3:2 — framed for the shape, not center-cropped into it — and a reveal reel renders at the format you pick. It's free, no credits. The point isn't convenience; it's that you decide what stays in frame instead of an upload dialog.
Rules of thumb worth memorizing
- Shoot wider than you need. Leave headroom and side room in the original so a vertical crop still has something to keep. Free insurance, costs nothing at capture time.
- The subject goes near the center. Anything you love that's within about 15% of the left or right edge is going to die in a 9:16 crop.
- One asset, two exports. A Feed 4:5 for the in-feed post and a Story 9:16 for the story of the same listing. It's the same photo, twice.
- Never post a screenshot. A screenshot of your own photo is a compressed, resized, wrongly-shaped copy of a thing you already have at full quality.
- Keep the MLS copy separate. Portals want the wide original, unbranded and uncropped. What you post socially and what you upload to the MLS are two different files. MLS photo requirements and branding without a watermark.
Resolution, briefly
1080 pixels on the short edge is enough for every one of these. Uploading a 6000-pixel-wide file doesn't get you a sharper post — the platform re-compresses everything on ingest anyway, and an oversized upload sometimes gets treated worse, not better. Export at the preset size and stop thinking about it. What actually determines whether your photo looks sharp on a phone is exposure and contrast, not pixel count: real estate photo editing basics.
If you only remember one thing
Feed 4:5 for the post. Story 9:16 for the story. Reel 9:16 for the video. That covers roughly everything an agent posts. Square when you need one file to go everywhere, and 3:2 when it's a rental cover photo. That's the whole system, and it's five formats, not fifty.
Where Stylst lands
Stylst stages, enhances, declutters, or dusks a phone photo for about a dollar, in about two minutes, no account or subscription on mobile. Every finished photo exports at Story, Reel, Feed, Square, or Airbnb 3:2 — free — with your brand strip and a caption if you want them. Stage a photo and export it at the shape you're actually posting to.
The bottom line
You spent time getting the room right, money getting the photo right, and then you let an upload dialog crop it. Export the shape the platform wants, keep the wide original for the MLS, and stop giving a crop algorithm creative control over your listing. It's the highest-return five seconds in your whole posting workflow.