Why do my images look grainy on social media?

While I love seeing my work posted on social media, occasionally the image(s) are not as sharp as the original.

Social Media sites typically resize the images to their preferred settings affecting the resolution of your image. “Resize” can mean several things: physical dimensions (theoretical with digital pictures, but they'll still have values for width x height), or the size of the file in pixels/bytes. These parameters can be changed in your editing software.

Here are some suggested settings when posting landscape images:

Instagram: 1080 x 566

Facebook: up to 2048 x 2048

Twitter: 1200 x 675 pixels