Snapchat image & ad sizes in 2026 (with templates)

Snapchat image sizes are the easiest of these to get right, and somehow people still get it wrong. The reason it's easy: almost everything on the platform is the same rectangle. A snap, a story, a spotlight clip, a single image ad, the cards inside a story ad, they're all 1080 x 1920, a 9:16 vertical full-screen shape. So you'd think you set the canvas once and you're done. This is the Snapchat slice of the full social media image size guide, which does the same copy-paste thing for every other platform.

The reason people still get it wrong is the safe zone. Snapchat lives full-screen on a phone, which means the app stacks its own stuff on top of your image. Your username and the snap timer sit at the top. On an ad, the bottom is owned by the call-to-action card. So if you center your logo or drop your headline near the bottom edge, the app politely covers it with a button and your design is now a button sandwich. The pixels are simple. The margins are the whole game.

Here's the full set. Pick a surface, copy the size, or grab the template.

Snaps and stories: one shape to remember

A single snap or a story is 1080 x 1920, 9:16, edge to edge. There's no border and no padding, the image is the entire screen. You can go as low as 720 x 1280 and it still holds up, but 1080 wide is the number to design at so it stays sharp on a modern phone.

The safe zone on a plain snap is gentler than on an ad. The top has your handle and the timer ring, the bottom has the swipe-up hint and the reply bar. Keep your important text out of roughly the top 150px and bottom 150px and you're fine. Center-ish, a little high, reads cleanest.

Spotlight is the same 1080 x 1920 frame, just for video, 5 to 60 seconds. Treat the cover still like any other 9:16 image. The catch with Spotlight is the right side: the like, share, and comment rail runs up the bottom-right, plus a caption and the creator handle, so push your subject left of that and a bit up. Same canvas, slightly hungrier UI.

Ads: where the bottom gets eaten

This is the part worth slowing down for. A single image or video ad is 1080 x 1920, same as everything else. What changes is how much of it you actually get to use.

Snapchat's Ads Manager has a safe-zone toggle, and out of the box it draws 150px off the top and 150px off the bottom. That's the floor. The thing the toggle undersells is the call-to-action treatment: the dynamic CTA card at the bottom can climb up to around 330px depending on the variant Snapchat serves. So if you design to a 150px bottom margin and Snapchat shows the taller CTA, your logo or your offer line gets clipped. I keep the live area between roughly 150px from the top and 330px from the bottom, with text and logo parked in the center. That way it survives whichever CTA shows up.

Story ads work the same way, just multiplied. You get 3 to 20 cards, each one a 1080 x 1920 snap, each with the same top icon and bottom CTA. Design every card to the same centered safe zone so the set reads as one piece when someone taps through. The little tile that opens a story ad in Discover is the odd one out at 360 x 600 (3:5), a small thumbnail on a crowded grid, so use a tight crop and make sure the logo is legible at that size.

Collection ads put four product tiles under the main snap. Those tiles are 800 x 800 squares (minimum 160 x 160, but go bigger). One product per tile, centered, filling the frame, no edge text. They render small and in a row, so clarity beats cleverness.

Snapchat geofilter size (1080 x 2340)

Geofilters break the 1080 x 1920 pattern, and this trips up everyone the first time. You upload at 1080 x 2340 as a transparent PNG. The taller height is overscan for different phone aspect ratios; the part that's actually guaranteed to show is the center 1080 x 1920 band. So you design inside that center band, keep the top and bottom edges clear, and let the extra height be safety padding that crops differently across devices.

Two more geofilter rules people miss: it has to be a transparent PNG (it overlays the photo, it isn't the photo), and Snapchat limits how much of the screen a filter can cover, somewhere around a quarter. Bottom-anchored banners and top corners are the usual home. Heavy full-frame designs get rejected.

File sizes and formats, quick version

Snapchat keeps the limits tight, which is unusual and actually helpful. Image snaps, story cards, and single image ads cap at 5 MB. The profile picture and the story ad tile are smaller, 2 MB. Geofilters are the strict one at 300 KB, because they're a transparent overlay and Snapchat wants them light. Video runs MP4 or MOV with H.264; Snapchat prefers the file under 32 MB even though it'll technically take far larger.

Stick to PNG and JPG for stills. PNG when there's text or sharp graphic edges, JPG when it's a photo and you want a smaller file. Geofilters have to be PNG so the transparency carries. That's the entire format decision.

Just grab the template

If you'd rather not think about any of this, hit the template pack button in the tool. You get a PNG for every Snapchat surface at the exact upload size, named so you know what each one is, with the safe zone and the CTA reach drawn right on the canvas. Drop one into Figma or Photoshop as a reference layer and design on top of it. The whole pack zips up in one click.

It's the same approach I use for the print dimensions tool, pointed at screens instead of paper. If you make assets for both, the print one handles DPI and bleed the way this one handles crops and safe zones.

If you're cutting the same vertical campaign across the other full-screen apps, I built matching pages for the two that share this 9:16 shape: TikTok image sizes and Instagram image sizes. Same copy-paste numbers and template packs, just sized for where each one crops the frame.

FAQ

The full set, with the safe zones and the downloadable templates, is in the tool at the top. Copy what you need, or take the whole pack.