Ghost Image Sizes: Feature, Cover, and Social Card Dimensions (2026)

Ghost post feature image size

There is no official Ghost feature image size, and that is not an oversight. Ghost stores the file you give it and hands the theme a set of widths; the theme picks the shape. What Ghost does fix is the ceiling — every uploadable image is resized down to a maximum width of 2000pxon the way in. Upload a 4000-pixel-wide export and you have not gained a pixel, you have only spent your plan’s file allowance on something Ghost throws away.

• 1200 x 675 is the shape that fits the feed. Source crops grid cards to exactly 16:9, so a 16:9 file lands in the feed with nothing cut off. Cards in the list layout are 1.618:1 and take a slice off the sides — the subject stays put either way.
• The post page never crops. Source renders the feature image at 100% width with no fixed ratio, so a tall image simply pushes the article text down the page. If a post looks like it has an enormous header, the image is portrait, not broken.
• 1200 wide is enough for the article itself. Source tells the browser the feature image is never rendered wider than 1120 CSS pixels. Go to 2000 x 1125 only if you care about retina screens rendering it at full bleed.
• Ghost builds the responsive set for you. Once the file is uploaded it is regenerated at every width the theme declares, and served with a srcset. You are choosing a source file, not a display size.
• Keep text out of the outer 15%. A headline baked into the image is safe at 16:9 and trimmed at 1.618:1, in the 3:2 highlight header, and in the 1:1 thumbnail of a featured list. Put the words in the post title, where the theme can typeset them.
• The feature image is your social card by default. With no card image set, Ghost hands the feature image to Facebook, LinkedIn and X — see the social card section below for what that costs you.

Resize an image to 1200x675 → Pick Ghost, then the Post Feature Image preset.

Ghost publication cover image size

The cover is the one Ghost puts a number on: use a minimum width of 1500px so it holds up on most devices. No height is given, because the cover is a background rather than a picture — themes stretch it to fill the header and crop whatever does not fit. 1500 x 500 meets the floor at a wide 3:1 band that reads as a header on a laptop and still has height to give away on a phone.

• It is a backdrop, not a banner. The site title, description and signup form are drawn over the cover in white. Busy photography and light areas eat the type; a dark image, a gradient or a texture keeps it readable.
• Some themes ignore it entirely. The cover is optional and only used where the theme calls for it. In Source it is the homepage background, and it can be switched off in Design settings without deleting the image.
• It is also your fallback social card. When a post has no card image and no feature image, Ghost falls back to the publication cover for og:image — so a 3:1 cover gets centre-cropped to 1.91:1 by Facebook and LinkedIn, losing the top and bottom.
• Don’t confuse it with the logo. The cover is the big header image; the publication logo is the small mark in the navigation bar. Uploading a logo as a cover produces a stretched, pixelated header.
• 2000px wide is the practical maximum. Ghost resizes uploads past 2000px wide, so a 3000px cover ends up 2000px anyway. Design at 1500 x 500 or 2000 x 667 and skip the round trip.

Resize an image to 1500x500 → Pick Ghost, then the Publication Cover preset.

Ghost author profile picture size

Ghost publishes no size for a staff profile picture, so the number worth working back from is what the theme actually asks for: Source requests the author image at 320px wide on the author archive and 160px in a byline. 400 x 400 clears the largest of those with retina headroom and stays small enough to load instantly next to every post title on the site.

• Upload square or the circle lies. Themes mask the image into a circle and fill the frame, so a landscape headshot loses both sides and a portrait one loses your chin. Crop to 1:1 before uploading.
• Frame it as a head, not a scene. At 40 pixels in a byline, a full-body photo is a smudge. Fill the frame with head and shoulders, keep the eyes near the top third.
• No picture means Gravatar decides. Ghost checks Gravatar against your account email, so an old avatar from a forum signup years ago can appear on your publication. Upload something deliberately, even if it’s a monogram.
• Every staff user has their own. Contributors, authors, editors and admins each carry a profile image into the bylines of posts they write — worth setting when you invite them, not after.
• The author page cover is a separate image. Each author can also have a cover image, and that is what Ghost uses as the social card for their archive page — the profile picture never becomes an og:image.

Resize an image to 400x400 → Pick Ghost, then the Author Profile Picture preset.

Ghost social sharing card size (og:image)

Ghost writes the Open Graph and X card tags for you, and it caps the image it points at: anything wider than 1200pxis rewritten to Ghost’s 1200-pixel social size before the tag is written. That makes 1200 x 630 the one export where the file you upload is the file the platform downloads — no re-encode, no scaling, no surprise softness on the card.

• The fallback chain is why cards look wrong. No card image on the post? Ghost uses the feature image. No feature image? The site-wide card image, then the publication cover. A 16:9 feature image is close enough to 1.91:1 to pass; a 3:1 cover is not.
• Set a card image when the feature image has words in it. Facebook and LinkedIn crop 16:9 to 1.91:1 and X can crop further. A dedicated 1200 x 630 with the text centred survives every one of them.
• X and Facebook are separate fields on purpose. Ghost keeps an X card and a Facebook card per post, and both fall back the same way. Fill one and the other still uses the feature image, so fill both or neither.
• Set the site-wide pair once. Settings → Meta data gives your homepage and every image-less post a decent card instead of whatever the cover happens to be.
• Then test the URL, not the theory. Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn’s Post Inspector both re-scrape on demand, which is also how you clear a cached wrong image after you fix it.

Resize an image to 1200x630 → Pick Ghost, then the Social Card (og:image) preset.

Ghost newsletter header image size

This is the most specific instruction Ghost gives about any image: 1200 x 600, PNG, transparent background. The transparency is the point — the header sits on the newsletter’s background colour, and a baked-in white rectangle becomes a visible white slab the moment you or a reader’s client changes that colour.

• 2:1 is deeper than it looks in an inbox. A full-width 1200 x 600 header eats most of a phone screen before the first sentence. Most publications use the canvas as a stage and let the artwork occupy a band across the middle.
• Design for both light and dark inboxes. Dark artwork on transparency vanishes against an inverted background. A mid-tone or outlined mark reads on either; pure black or pure white rarely does.
• The header replaces the site title, so it needs to say the name. When a header image is set it stands in for the text title at the top of the email — a decorative pattern with no wordmark leaves the newsletter unnamed.
• It is separate from the post feature image. The feature image can be shown or hidden per newsletter under the Title settings; the header image is the branding above it, sent with every issue.
• Each newsletter is configured separately. Running a weekly and a paid-members newsletter means two header images — they don’t inherit from one another.

Resize an image to 1200x600 → Pick Ghost, then the Newsletter Header preset.

Publication icon and logo

The icon is the strictest upload in Ghost: square, 60 to 1,000 pixels, PNG or ICO, and under 100kb — Ghost rejects anything else outright. 256 x 256 is the size to aim at, because that is exactly what Ghost resizes a PNG icon to when it serves your favicon. The logo is the opposite shape and the opposite problem: it sits in the navigation bar, so it needs to be wide, transparent, and legible at a couple of centimetres.

• Under 100kb is the constraint people trip on. A 1000 x 1000 photographic icon will not fit in 100kb. Flat colour and a single shape will, comfortably, at 256 x 256.
• Use PNG, not ICO, unless you need a legacy favicon. Ghost resizes a PNG to 256 x 256 for you; an .ico is served exactly as uploaded, at whatever size it happens to contain.
• The icon is more than a favicon. It appears in the browser tab, in the Ghost admin corner, and as the mark on your signup forms — a wordmark squeezed into a square reads as a grey blur in all three.
• 600 x 72 is a floor, not a target. Upload the logo at 2x — 1200 x 144 in the same proportion — and it stays sharp on retina screens. Height is what themes constrain, so the width follows from your artwork.
• Ghost only reports logo dimensions in structured data up to 600 x 60. A taller logo still displays fine, it just doesn’t carry size information into the publisher markup — one more reason to keep the lockup shallow.
• Transparent PNG both times. The logo sits on your theme’s header colour and the icon on a browser tab; a white box behind either shows up the moment the background isn’t white.