Quick Blog Tip – Getting ‘Featured Images’ to Crop Correctly

As you probably know – WordPress uses ‘Featured Images’, these images often appear as post thumbnails, or when you share a post to Facebook and Twitter.

A lot of bloggers can’t get their head around how these crop down when shown in Facebook or Twitter, and so when they are displayed – important stuff can be cropped off, especially if you put text in the featured images. I’ve done a little playing, and I think I’ve got a relatively simple method to get them to crop correctly. I’m personally not a fan of putting too much text into a featured image (usually because it’s cut off).

Facebook and Twitter tend to like ‘Landscape’ pictures, and will occasionally crop them to squares. With this in mind, if you want your text, or the focal point of the image to be seen either way, you need to have the ratio bang on. Personally I think it’s good to aim for a resolution of 2764 x 1456 (especially if you want your featured images to be future-proof and retina ready). You can go for half the size which is 1382 x 728, the ratio is the same – roughly 2:1.

So… Here’s an example of a correct ratio Featured Image.

So – anything in the grey space should be the focal point of your image, and where any text you want should be. Anything out of the ‘grey zone’ risks being cropped if Twitter or Facebook decide to serve a ‘thumbnail’ (square version).

So for example this is the Featured Image from yesterday’s post.

If you look at it on Facebook – it looks like this –

Perfect! Twitter REALLY likes to serve up both the full image and a thumbnailed version, so this is the same image displayed on Twitter.

So there you go, if you keep your featured images within ratios ‘liked’ by Facebook and Twitter, it shouldn’t chop off anything important. Plus if you want to make sure your text isn’t cropped, keep it within the ‘centre square’.