It is 4:47 on a Thursday afternoon when the message arrives: "Can we get the launch photo in all the formats? Need it by six." Attached is one beautiful landscape image, 6000 × 4000 pixels, straight from the camera.
"All the formats" turns out to mean five: a 16:9 website banner, a 1:1 feed post, a 4:5 portrait post, a 9:16 story, and a 1.91:1 link preview. One photo, five shapes, an hour and thirteen minutes.
Step one: name the source
Before cropping anything, Maya drops the file into a ratio finder. 6000 × 4000 simplifies to 3:2, a decimal of 1.5. That one number already tells her how each crop will go:
- 16:9 (1.78) is wider than 1.5, so she loses some height: about 16% of the image.
- 1.91:1 is wider still, so she loses more height: about 21%.
- 1:1 (1.0) is narrower, so she loses width: about 33%.
- 4:5 (0.8) is much narrower: about 47% of the width goes.
- 9:16 (0.5625) is the hardest: about 62% of the width is cropped away.
Now she knows where the risk is. The banner and link preview are easy. The story is where the composition will break.
Step two: find what must survive
The photo shows a product on a table, a person's hands to the left, and a soft window on the right. In a 9:16 crop, only a narrow vertical strip survives. Centred, that strip holds the product but cuts the hands in half. Moved left, it keeps the hands and loses the product's logo.
She decides the product is what matters, centres the crop on it, and accepts that the hands become a hint at the edge. Making that decision once, deliberately, is quicker than trying four crops and hoping one looks right.
Step three: export at real sizes
| Format | Export size | Source pixels used |
|---|---|---|
| 16:9 banner | 1920 × 1080 | 6000 × 3375 |
| 1.91:1 link preview | 1200 × 628 | 6000 × 3141 |
| 1:1 post | 1080 × 1080 | 4000 × 4000 |
| 4:5 post | 1080 × 1350 | 3200 × 4000 |
| 9:16 story | 1080 × 1920 | 2250 × 4000 |
Even the most aggressive crop still has more than twice the pixels the export needs. The high-resolution original makes the crops affordable: none of the exports will look soft.
Step four: write it down
At 5:41 she sends the files with a short note: which crops lost what, and one suggestion. "Next time, if we shoot a vertical version on set, the story won't have to sacrifice the hands."
That note is the real deliverable. The next request will come with a vertical frame already shot, and the five-format job will take twenty minutes instead of an hour.
The lesson: find the source ratio first. One number tells you which crops are easy and which need a real decision.
Try it with your own image in the image ratio finder. The format-fit list shows the approximate crop for each shape, and the formatter lets you position and download each size without uploading anything.