Pinterest pin size: 1000 × 1500, and what actually gets cropped

Every guide to this repeats the same number without saying where it comes from, so here is the reasoning, and then the parts that actually cause trouble.

The number, and why it is that number

1000 × 1500 pixels. A 2:3 ratio.

Pinterest's feed is a masonry grid: fixed column width, variable height. Every pin in a column is scaled to the same width, so the only thing an image can compete on is how tall it is once scaled. A 2:3 pin at a 236 px column renders 354 px tall. A square one renders 236 px. That is the entire mechanism — tall pins are repinned around 60% more often than square ones, and it is not because the algorithm prefers them. It is because they were on screen longer.

The ratio matters. The pixel count mostly does not. Pinterest resizes everything on upload, so a 2000 × 3000 export and a 1000 × 1500 export look the same in the feed and the same on the closeup. 1000 px wide is the floor at which a pin still looks sharp on a 3× phone display; below that it goes soft and the text you drew on it goes first.

What actually gets cropped

This is the part the size charts skip.

Long infographic pins are the usual casualty. A 1000 × 3000 "10 steps to…" graphic is not rejected — it is silently cut, and the cut lands wherever it lands. If you have made one and it is underperforming, that is very often the reason and nothing to do with the content.

The other silent failure is the file itself. The ceiling is 20 MB, in JPG, PNG or WebP. A design tool exporting a photo-heavy pin as PNG will sail past 20 MB without warning you, and the upload fails with a message that does not mention size. Export photographic pins as JPG at 80 quality and this stops happening.

The safe-area problem nobody mentions

Pinterest overlays UI on your image in several places, and where it lands depends on the surface:

• The save button sits top-right on hover in the grid, over roughly the top 15% of the pin.
• Product tags and price badges, on merchant pins, sit bottom-left.
• In the feed thumbnail, the bottom 10–12% is where the title text begins on some layouts.

Nothing here is documented as a hard rule, and it changes. The practical response is not to memorise a safe-area diagram — it is to keep the middle 70% of the pin carrying the whole message, so that any of these overlays covering an edge costs you decoration rather than meaning.

Text on the image is worth having, and it is a ranking input: Pinterest reads on-image text, and on-image text sits alongside pin titles and board names in what the algorithm scores. But it has to survive being 236 px wide. The test is simple: shrink your pin to thumbnail size on screen and see whether the headline is still legible. Most designs fail this at around 24 px of type at full size.

Titles and descriptions, and the two numbers that matter

• Title: 100 characters. Hard cut.
• Description: 800 characters. Hard cut.

Those are the limits. They are not the targets. In the feed, a title truncates around 40 characters depending on the surface and the language, so the words that decide whether someone clicks need to be in the first forty. "How to Prune Tomatoes for a Bigger Harvest" survives truncation. "The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Pruning Tomatoes" becomes "The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Nee…".

Descriptions are read by Pinterest for keywords and by very few humans. Write them as a real sentence containing the phrases someone would search — not a comma-separated keyword dump, which Pinterest has been discounting for years and which reads as spam to the minority who do expand it.

What to do with this

If you are making pins by hand: build one 1000 × 1500 template, keep the message in the middle 70%, export as JPG, and check the thumbnail before you publish.

If you are making a lot of them, the sizing stops being a design decision and becomes a build setting. That is roughly why BatchPin renders every pin at 1000 × 1500 with no option to change it — the ratio is the one variable with a single correct answer, so exposing it as a choice only ever produces mistakes.

You can check any image you already have against all of this with our Pinterest pin size checker — drop a file in and it tells you the ratio, whether the feed will truncate it, and what to export instead.