Video sizes for TikTok, Reels and Shorts in 2026

Check a video against all three at once, with its shape, size, length and file, in the free video size checker. For how long a clip should actually run, see how long a short video should be.

9:16 is a phone screen held upright, so it's the shape that fills the feed on all three apps. 1080 pixels wide clears every app's bar: Instagram asks for at least 720, TikTok on the web for 720 × 1280, and TikTok's Creator Rewards Program asks for 1080p or higher for its additional reward. You can upload bigger, but 1080 × 1920 is the size that meets every rule.

• Frame rate. Instagram asks for at least 30 fps. YouTube asks you to upload at the frame rate you recorded at, such as 24, 30 or 60. TikTok doesn't publish one. Keep the frame rate you recorded at, as long as it's 30 or more.
• File. MP4 with H.264 video and AAC sound works everywhere: it's what YouTube recommends, and one of the two formats TikTok takes on the web, with WebM. TikTok's web upload takes files under 10 GB.
• Don't shrink it first. All three apps re-encode what you upload, so post the best copy you have. Compress only to send a video somewhere with a size limit, like Discord or email, with the video compressor.

• TikTok plays vertical videos full screen, and horizontal ones in its full screen mode. Uploads on the web must be MP4 or WebM, at least 720 × 1280, up to 30 minutes and under 10 GB. In the app you can upload up to 60 minutes and record up to 10. TikTok also asks you to keep the picture centered and clear of its buttons.
• Instagram Reels takes shapes from 1.91:1 to 9:16, at 30 fps and 720 pixels or more, up to 20 minutes. Reels over 3 minutes aren't recommended to new audiences, and Instagram shows reels less often when they're blurry or low resolution, muted, or have borders, logos or watermarks. A reel's cover is 420 × 654 pixels.
• YouTube Shorts are any square or vertical video up to 3 minutes. A wider video, like 16:9, is posted as a regular video instead, however short. YouTube recommends 9:16 for a Short's custom thumbnail.

Each app lays its buttons, username, caption and sound over the video. Anything under them, like a caption or a face, gets covered. None of the apps publishes exact margins, and they move a little between phones and app versions, so these are rounded and on the generous side, on a 1080 × 1920 frame:

To be clear on all three, keep text inside a 820 × 1260 area: 240 pixels from the top, 420 from the bottom, 60 from the left and 200 from the right. Captions sit best in the lower middle, just above the bottom margin. Put your own clip over each app's layout with the safe zone checker.

Most long videos are 16:9: podcasts, streams, interviews, anything shot for YouTube. There are three ways to make one vertical, and they look very different.

• Fit it, with bars. The whole picture stays, shrunk to the width of the screen, with blank space above and below. It fills only 32% of the screen, so faces are small, and the bars count against it: Instagram shows reels with borders less often, and YouTube advises against adding bars to a video at all.
• Crop the middle. A 9:16 window from the center of a 1920 × 1080 frame is 608 × 1080 pixels, scaled up to 1080 × 1920. It fills the screen but keeps only 32% of the picture, so anyone off center is cut out.
• Reframe on the speaker. The same 608 × 1080 window, moved to whoever's talking as the video plays. It fills the screen and keeps the person who matters in it.

Work out the crop for any size with the aspect ratio calculator, or crop or fit a video free in your browser with the vertical video converter. For the whole process, from a long YouTube video to Shorts, read how to turn a YouTube video into Shorts.

Outside the full screen feeds, the shapes change. Instagram keeps a photo at its own resolution, up to 1080 pixels wide, when its shape is between 1.91:1 and 3:4: at 1080 wide, from 1080 × 566 to 1080 × 1440. YouTube's standard on a computer is 16:9, and its player adapts to other shapes on its own.

YouTube asks for thumbnails as large as possible, as JPG or PNG, up to 2 MB from a phone or 50 MB from a computer, since a thumbnail is also the preview in embedded players. 1280 × 720 is still 16:9 and well over the minimum, so it works.