Make Social Media Posts from Your Own Photos

Pick the format before you design

A square design squeezed into a portrait slot loses the top and bottom of every face in it. A landscape banner scaled into a thumbnail turns your caption into a gray smudge. Neither is recoverable afterwards, because the pixels that got cropped were never rendered.

So the first thing the collage canvas asks for is not a layout — it is a size, chosen from a menu of real, named destinations. You are not typing in “1080 by 1350” and hoping; you are choosing Instagram → Portrait Post, and the canvas becomes exactly that. Everything you place afterwards is composed for the shape it will actually appear in.

This guide covers the formats and how a post gets from your library to a file you can upload. For the studio itself — layers, frames, text and effects — see photo collages & carousels.

Every format, by platform

These are the presets as they appear in the canvas size menu, with the pixel dimensions each one produces.

Instagram

• Square Post — 1080×1080 (1:1)
• Portrait Post — 1080×1350 (4:5), the tall format that takes up the most feed space
• Story / Reel — 1080×1920 (9:16)
• Carousel — multi-page at 1080×1350 per slide

Facebook

• Feed (Square) — 1080×1080
• Feed (Portrait) — 1080×1350
• Shared Link — 1200×630 (1.91:1)
• Story — 1080×1920
• Cover Photo — 1640×624

YouTube

• Thumbnail — 1280×720
• Video — 1920×1080
• Channel Banner — 2560×1440
• Short — 1080×1920

Everywhere else

• TikTok Video — 1080×1920
• X / Twitter — Post 1600×900, Header 1500×500
• LinkedIn — Post 1200×627, Banner 1584×396
• Pinterest Pin — 1000×1500 (2:3)
• Snapchat Story / Spotlight — 1080×1920

Print and paper

The same menu carries print sizes at 300 DPI — 4×6, 5×7, 6×8, 8×10, 8×12, 11×14, 12×18, 16×20 and 20×30 inches — plus A5, A4, A3 and A2, and square 8×8 and 12×12. The thing you made for a post is therefore one size-change away from being something you can hang on a wall.

Layouts are a separate choice

It is worth separating two things that sound alike. The format decides the shape and pixel size of the canvas, per platform, as above. The layout decides how your photos sit inside it, and those are deliberately plain geometry: two side by side, a four grid, a six grid and a nine grid.

That is on purpose. A grid that does not draw attention to itself is what lets the photographs do the work — and once you have arranged something you like, you can save it as your own template and start the next post from it, which is how a set of posts ends up looking like a set rather than a coincidence.

Carousels, built as one design

A carousel is the swipeable multi-slide post, and PDR builds it in the way that makes the seams work: as one wide canvas, not as a folder of separate images you hope line up. You design across the whole thing, and PDR slices it into slides on the way out.

• Two to ten slides, chosen up front.
• Every slide exports at exactly 1080×1350, the tall Instagram portrait shape.
• Files are named slide_01, slide_02 and so on, zero-padded, so they upload in the right order every time.
• A single wide image of the entire design is saved alongside the slides, which is useful for checking the joins before you post.
• Re-saving a carousel replaces the previous version rather than stacking up near-identical copies.

Where finished posts go

Nothing you make is exported into a folder you then have to remember. Finished collages are filed back into your library under PDR Collages → Collages, and each carousel gets its own album under PDR Collages → Carousels, so the slides for one post stay together.

Output is a JPEG at high quality, or a PNG when the canvas is transparent — which is what you want for a logo overlay or a cut-out with no background.

Getting it onto the phone you post from

Most people post from a phone and design on a PC, which is usually the fiddly part. Two routes, neither of which involves emailing yourself a file:

• Send to Phone. A QR code appears on your monitor; point your phone camera at it and save the images straight from your browser. It runs over your own Wi-Fi and nothing is uploaded.
• Drag it. If you post from the desktop, drag the finished image out of PDR and drop it directly onto the upload area in your browser — no export step in between.

Both are covered properly, with their limits, in getting photos out of PDR.