beehiiv Image Sizes — Thumbnail, Logo & Inline Image Dimensions

beehiiv thumbnail size (1200x630px)

The post thumbnail is the hardest-working image in a beehiiv publication. It is 1200x630 pixels, roughly 1.91:1, and it does three jobs at once: the card image in your web archive, the SEO image for the post page, and the Open Graph preview when somebody shares the link. beehiiv has no separate social-share uploader — the thumbnail is the OG image.

• 1200x630 is the cross-platform share standard. The same export works as a Twitter/X card image and a LinkedIn post image, so one crop covers your whole distribution.
• Text near the edges gets cropped. Different share surfaces trim the 1.91:1 frame to their own ratios. Keep headlines and logos inside the middle 80%.
• It is not the email header. beehiiv doesn’t force a hero image into the email — if you want one, you place it as the first inline image in the body.
• Skip it and the share preview falls back. A post without a thumbnail shares as a bare link with no image — the least appealing thing you can put in a timeline.

beehiiv logo and profile picture (800x800px)

beehiiv recommends 800x800 pixels for both the publication logo and the publisher profile picture, square in each case. Subscriber profile pictures are a much smaller 100x100. All of them accept JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF.

• Upload square or lose the edges. A non-square logo is cropped to 1:1, not letterboxed. Square your canvas first and add padding rather than letting beehiiv choose what to cut.
• 800x800 is generous on purpose. The logo renders small in the email header, so the extra resolution exists for retina screens — not because it displays at 800px.
• Pad the focal element. Leave roughly 10% breathing room around a wordmark so it survives any rounded or circular mask.
• Test the logo on a dark background. Many subscribers read in dark mode, and a black-on-transparent PNG disappears entirely. A light stroke or a solid background plate fixes it.

beehiiv inline content image size

beehiiv does not publish a fixed pixel dimension for images inside the body of a post. Its guidance is about width: match the email template, and keep inline images at 600px wide or less in their rendered size. That is the long-standing safe width for email clients, and beehiiv follows it.

• Export at 1200px wide, display at 600. Retina inboxes render at 2x device pixels. Give them a 1200px source and the image stays crisp; hand them a 600px source and it looks soft on every modern phone.
• Don’t go past 1200px. Beyond 2x you are paying in file size for resolution nobody sees, and you have a 5MB ceiling to respect.
• Height is yours to choose. 16:9 (1200x675) reads as a figure or screenshot; 1:1 (1200x1200) claims more vertical space in the inbox. beehiiv imposes neither.
• Screenshots are a special case. Capture at native resolution and downscale to 1200px wide — never upscale a small screenshot, which turns crisp UI text into mush.

Write alt text on every image. Plenty of inboxes block remote images until the reader clicks “display images,” and alt text is the only thing standing between them and a wall of grey boxes.

Email rendering best practices for beehiiv

A newsletter image has to survive Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook — three renderers that disagree about almost everything. These are the constraints that actually bite.

beehiiv vs Substack image sizes

The two platforms differ more than you would expect for tools that both send newsletters. Substack builds around a wide 16:9 hero at the top of every post; beehiiv builds around a 1.91:1 thumbnail that is really a share card. If you are migrating, none of your header images carry over cleanly — the crop changes.

• The header is the big migration gotcha. A 1456x816 Substack hero cropped to 1.91:1 loses about 15% of its height. Re-crop from the original, don’t stretch the export.
• beehiiv wants bigger logos. 800x800 against Substack’s 256x256 — if you are moving over, re-export the logo from the vector source rather than upscaling a 256px PNG.
• Inline widths are close enough to reuse. A 1200px-wide export is a clean 2x on both platforms.
• Full details: Substack image sizes and Medium image sizes.