Crop an Image for a Facebook Cover Photo (Free)

Facebook shows a different slice of your cover photo on phones than on desktop. Design for the overlap.

The recurring frustration with Facebook covers is that there is no single correct crop. Desktop shows a wide, short strip. Mobile shows a taller, narrower one. The same image is cut two different ways, and an image composed for one usually looks wrong in the other.

Compose for the middle

The region visible in both layouts is a band through the centre. Put anything that matters — faces, a logo, text — in the middle of the frame, horizontally and vertically. Treat the far left and right edges as decoration that may vanish on a phone.

Crop wide, then check the centre

Use the cropper's wide ratio to get the overall shape, and keep the subject central rather than pushed to one side. A well-centred composition survives both crops; a subject at the edge does not.

Upload bigger than you need

Facebook re-compresses covers, and a small upload gets enlarged and softened before that. Give it something comfortably larger than the display size so its own processing has good material to work from.

Crop your cover now — free

Drop the photo in, crop wide, download. Free, in the browser, no watermark.