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What a 3:1 Strip Does to a Photograph

A profile banner is 1500 pixels wide and 500 tall, which is three to one. Almost nothing is photographed at three to one. Camera sensors are 3:2, phones shoot 4:3, and anything already cropped for a feed is square or taller than it is wide, so every image arriving here has to surrender most of its height or spend most of the banner on background. That is the whole of the problem, and it is better met before you upload than after. The figures, for the shapes people actually own. A 6000 x 4000 camera file is 3:2, and filling the banner keeps exactly half its height. A 4032 x 3024 phone photo taken sideways keeps 44 percent. The same phone held upright keeps 25 percent. A square export keeps a third. In every one of those cases the surviving band is taken from the vertical middle, because nothing here knows where the subject is - so a horizon sitting two thirds down the frame, or a face in the lower third, is precisely the composition that comes out wrong. Keeping the whole image turns each of those figures inside out into background: the upright photo becomes a 375 pixel picture with 562 pixels of flat colour on either side of it. Some pictures take this well. A landscape with a wide horizon, a texture, a repeating pattern, a long row of anything, a shot deliberately taken with air on both sides - these give up height that was never carrying the image. A single portrait, a close-up, or artwork composed inside a square do not, and no fit setting rescues them. When the picture matters, cut a 3:1 band out of it by hand with the crop tool on this site, choosing which band survives, then bring that here to land it exactly on 1500 x 500. Resolution is rarely what stops you, since 1500 pixels across is less than almost any phone or camera produces and most sources shrink rather than stretch. The exception is a band cut out of something already small: a strip taken from a 1080 pixel wide screenshot has to be enlarged about 1.4 times to reach 1500, and the result line names that factor instead of applying it quietly. On weight and format, the upload takes JPEG, PNG and GIF and stops at 2 MB, a ceiling a 1500 x 500 photograph never comes close to - a few hundred kilobytes is typical. As everywhere on this site the scaling and cropping run on the canvas element in your own browser, and no copy of the picture is sent to a server.