An Author’s Guide to Perfectly Sized Pinterest Images

When you’re busy writing, we understand that the last thing an author wants to worry about is posting to their social media. Even worse, when it comes time to update your profiles with new images, getting the sizing exactly right can be a nightmare. Often, this results in wasted time as you continually edit and re-size your images.

On Pinterest, optimizing your images makes a massive difference between fantastic engagement and no engagement. Also, as the Pinterest algorithm favours high quality and sharable content, the first step is to have correctly sized images if you want your content to be seen by your audience.

With these facts in mind, here is a quick (but handy!) breakdown of Pinterest’s image sizes:

Profile Image – Your profile image appears both on the Pinterest home page and in the top right of pages you visit.

165 X 165 pixels on the home page
This will be truncated to 32 X 32 on the rest of Pinterest
Your file upload should be no larger than 10 MB

Board Display – A fully optimized board preview features 5 images – 1 large thumbnail and 4 smaller thumbnail images. Always remember to choose an enticing image for your large thumbnail, as this is what will lead to board clicks!

Large Thumbnail – 222 X 150 pixels
Smaller Thumbnails – 55 X 55 pixels

Pin Size – A pin is an image that you post to Pinterest, typically to one or more boards. Here, it’s important to remember that scaling will automatically occur for height.

Pins on Home Page – 236 pixels wide (height is scaled)
Pins on a Board – 236 pixels (height is scaled)
Expanded Pins – 735 pixels (height is scaled)

Image from a Website – Let’s say, for example, that you want to pin a picture from your latest book signing. Previously, you wrote a blog that used the picture you want to pin. Rather than uploading it to Pinterest, you can pin it directly from your website.

Images on a Website – Minimum 80 X 80 pixels