The Best Screenshot, GIF, and Video Sizes for X in 2026

These are the current limits worth knowing before you export anything. Images can be up to 5MB. GIFs can be up to 15MB on web. Videos can be up to 512MB and up to 2 minutes 20 seconds long for standard accounts. Go over any of these and X will either reject the upload or compress it harder than you want.

X also converts every GIF you upload into a video internally. This matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the smoothness and color quality you see after upload is partly determined by X's own conversion, not just your original file. A cleanly encoded GIF survives that conversion better than a noisy, high-color one.

X's recommended aspect ratios are 16:9 and 1:1. These are the safest defaults because they're what the timeline is built around, they render predictably in both the feed and when someone taps to expand the media, and they don't get awkwardly cropped in preview thumbnails the way unusual ratios sometimes do.

16:9 works well for wide UI, dashboards, full app screenshots, and anything landscape by nature. 1:1 works well for anything you want to feel more like a focused product shot, a single component, a mobile screen mockup, or a tight crop on one metric or chart.

4:5 (portrait, taller than it is wide) can work for mobile app screenshots and does take up more vertical space in a feed, which some people use deliberately for that reason, but it's a riskier choice. It's not one of X's own recommended ratios, so preview cropping behaves less predictably, and it can look cramped when the same tweet is opened on a wider desktop timeline. If you want reliability across devices, default to 16:9 or 1:1 and treat 4:5 as a deliberate exception, not your default.

Most impressions on X happen on a phone, and phones today render at high pixel density, so an image that's technically clear at 800px wide can look soft or slightly blurry once it's displayed at 2x or 3x density on a modern phone screen. Export wider than you think you need.

Aim for at least 1600px wide for any screenshot you're posting as a standalone image or as part of a GIF or video. Going wider than that has diminishing returns for file size versus visible sharpness, but going narrower than 1600px is where text and fine UI detail starts to visibly soften on mobile.

If you're linking out to your own site, blog post, or landing page from a tweet, the image that shows up in that link preview isn't controlled by your tweet media settings, it's the Open Graph (or Twitter card) image defined in your page's meta tags. That image renders best at 1200x630, a wider ratio than either 16:9 or 1:1.

This is a separate asset from your in-tweet screenshot, and it's worth generating on purpose rather than letting your site fall back to a generic default or your logo. A well-made 1200x630 OG image is one of the highest leverage small assets you can make, since it shows up every time your link is shared anywhere, not just on X.

Format choice affects both quality and file size more than most people account for. PNG is the right choice for UI screenshots, dashboards, and anything with sharp edges and flat colors, since it compresses that kind of content losslessly and keeps text crisp. JPEG is better for photos or anything with lots of gradients and natural color, where PNG's lossless approach makes the file unnecessarily large.

For motion, GIF is the format to reach for when you specifically need something that behaves like an image (autoplays without a play button, works in places that don't support video embeds), and Shotmesh keeps GIF exports automatically under the 15MB limit so you don't have to guess at settings. For anything longer than a few seconds or with more color complexity, MP4 is the better choice, since it's smaller and sharper at the same visual quality and has no 15MB ceiling to work around.