TikTok is a full-screen, vertical-first feed, and it was designed around video shot for a phone held upright, not adapted from something shot for a wider screen. Upload a landscape video and TikTok either pads it with bars or crops it, and either way it looks out of place next to everything else in the feed.
Here are the dimensions TikTok uses.
| Type | Size | Aspect ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Profile Photo | 200 x 200 | 1:1 |
| Video / Photo | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 |
| Video (Alt Landscape) | 1920 x 1080 | 16:9 |
| Video (Alt Square) | 1080 x 1080 | 1:1 |
| Thumbnail | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 |
| Ad (In-Feed) | 1080 x 1920 | 9:16 |
Which size to actually use
1080 x 1920 is the size to shoot and export for, full stop, it’s the only dimension that fills the screen the way TikTok’s feed is built to display. The alternative landscape and square sizes exist for content you’re repurposing from elsewhere, but they’ll always show up smaller in-feed, surrounded by empty space, next to full-frame vertical videos.
Because the video fills the whole screen, TikTok’s own interface, captions, the like and share buttons, the username, sits directly on top of it. Keep your subject and any on-screen text away from the top and bottom of the frame. Text placed too close to either edge gets partially covered.
Thumbnails share the same 1080 x 1920 frame as the video itself, so the safest approach is to pick a frame from the video (or design a cover) that already respects those same top-and-bottom margins.
Format and common mistakes
Shoot vertically in the first place rather than shooting landscape and cropping later, you keep control over framing instead of losing the sides of the shot. If you’re starting from an existing image or video at the wrong ratio, a social media image resizer gets it to 1080 x 1920 quickly.
The most common mistake is uploading a landscape video with black bars on the sides, added by an editor to “fit” the vertical frame, it reads as low-effort compared to content genuinely shot for the format. If you’re formatting content for multiple platforms at once, the social media image size guide keeps every dimension straight.
Large source files also slow down upload for no visible gain at feed resolution. An image compressor is useful for cover images and thumbnails specifically, keeping file size down without a visible quality loss.