Facebook Ad Image Sizes — Single Image, Carousel, Stories & Reels

Single-Image Feed Ads

The workhorse format. Meta recommends 1440x1800 — a 4:5 portrait — at up to 30MB in JPG or PNG, with a floor of 600x750. The same 4:5 spec applies whether the campaign objective is awareness, traffic, leads, or sales.

• 4:5 is a mobile decision: a portrait image claims more vertical feed space on a phone than a landscape one, and almost everyone sees the ad on a phone. That is the whole reason the recommendation moved.
• 1440x1800, not 1080x1350: both are 4:5. Meta asks for the larger one, which gives its compressor more to work with. Design at 1440x1800 and you can derive 1080x1350 for free.
• 600x750 is the floor: below Meta’s minimum width of 600 pixels the ad may not deliver. It is a floor, not a target.
• Keep the headline out of the image: Meta composes your 27-character headline and primary text around the creative. Burning the same words into the picture prints them twice.
• 30MB in JPG or PNG: generous enough that it never binds. Use PNG for flat colour and type, JPG for photography.

Carousel Ads

A carousel is 2 to 10 cards the viewer swipes through, each with its own image, headline, and link. Cards are 1:1 — Meta gives a minimum of 1080x1080, at up to 30MB per image.

• Square, not 4:5: the carousel is the one feed format that did not move to portrait. A 1440x1800 feed image cropped into a carousel card loses its top and bottom.
• Every card is the same size: mixing ratios across cards guarantees a crop. Build all of them on one 1080x1080 canvas.
• Cards get reordered: Meta can show your best-performing card first unless you pin it. A composition that only reads left-to-right — a panorama split across cards, a numbered sequence — breaks when the order changes.
• 2 to 10 cards on Facebook Feed; 3 to 10 in Stories: and Stories carousels are images only. Video is not supported there.
• Card headlines are short: plan on roughly 20 to 25 characters reading comfortably. The exact limits shift by campaign objective, so check the field in Ads Manager rather than designing to a number.

Stories & Reels Ads

Both are fullscreen 9:16 at 1440x2560, JPG or PNG, up to 30MB. They share a spec — and a safe zone — but not a floor: Stories has a minimum width of 500 pixels and a tight 1% ratio tolerance, while Reels asks for at least 600x600 and allows 3%. A Stories image ad displays for eight seconds, or until the viewer swipes away.

• The bottom 35% is the expensive one: a third of your canvas is reserved for the call-to-action button and the engagement rail. Centring your logo vertically puts it directly behind the CTA.
• Design top-heavy: the safe rectangle’s centre sits well above the canvas centre. Anchor the product and the words there, not in the middle of the frame.
• Stories carousels quote an older, looser zone: Meta’s carousel-in-Stories page still gives 14% (250px) off the top and 20% (340px) off the bottom. Design to the stricter 35% bottom margin and you satisfy both.
• Copy fields are brutally short here: Reels allows 40 characters of primary text and a 55-character headline; Stories allows 125 and 40. There is no room for a second sentence.
• Meta discourages text in the image on Reels outright: its own guidance for the placement reads “due to the small image size, we recommend that you don’t add text on images.”

Text Overlay Rules

The famous 20% text rule — the one that rejected ads whose image was more than a fifth covered in words, and the grid tool that measured it — no longer exists. Meta retired it in September 2020, stating that it would “no longer penalise ads with higher amounts of image text in auctions and delivery” and that it would begin removing the material describing the rule. The text overlay checking tool went with it.

• Nothing is rejected for text density any more: if your ad is not delivering, image text is not the reason. Look elsewhere.
• Meta still recommends less of it: its stated position is that images with under 20% text generally perform better. That is advice about results, not a gate on delivery — a meaningful difference.
• Two placements go further: for Reels and for the desktop right column, Meta explicitly recommends adding no text to the image at all, because the rendered image is small.
• The text fields are the right place for words: primary text, headline, and description are selectable, translatable, and get re-composed per placement. Words baked into a JPEG are none of those things.
• Advertising Policies still apply: the 20% rule is gone, but what an ad may claim and show has not changed.

Frequently Asked Questions