Compress Image for X (Twitter)

Need to compress images for X (formerly Twitter) before posting? The platform's transcoder aggressively re-encodes any upload that doesn't match its preferred spec — 1200×675 for in-stream images, 1200×628 for Open Graph link cards, 400×400 for profile pictures, 1500×500 for header banners. The infamous 'Twitter image quality' complaint that has trended repeatedly since 2018 traces directly to oversized PNG uploads that X crushes to JPEG itself with visible blocking artifacts in detailed textures, gradients, and text. Pre-compressing locally to X's spec means what followers see in their timeline is essentially what you exported from your editor — no second pass of lossy compression, no surprise quality loss, no color shifts.

• 1X's re-encoder is notoriously aggressive on PNG uploads — pre-compressing to JPEG locally is the only reliable way to keep detail in textures, gradients, and text overlays.
• 21200×675 is the in-stream spec for photos. Anything larger gets downscaled by X with quality loss; anything smaller gets upscaled with blur. Letterboxed or wrong-aspect-ratio images get cropped unpredictably in the timeline preview.
• 3JPEG is the universally-supported format on X. PNG uploads get re-encoded to JPEG on the server side with quality loss and color shifts in transparent areas (which X fills with white).
• 4Local processing avoids uploading to a third-party service — important for journalists, activists, and sources who need to share photos without leaving traces on compression servers controlled by third parties.
• 5Pre-compressed JPEGs upload 80-95% faster than raw camera photos. On flaky mobile connections this is the difference between a successful post and the 'upload failed, retrying' loop.
• 6Link cards (Open Graph images) have a specific 1200×628 spec. Pre-compression ensures your card preview looks crisp when your URL is shared in tweets, DMs, and link-in-bio pages.
• 7Header banners (1500×500) display full-width at the top of your profile — a blurry or artifacted header immediately signals low-effort branding.
• 8Color profile matters: X strips ICC profiles on upload. Converting to sRGB before uploading prevents color shifts that the platform's transcoder would otherwise introduce.