Etsy listing image size, and why square is not the safe choice

Most size guides stop at “2000 pixels”. The part that changes what your listing looks like is the shape, and Etsy is specific about it.

Last checked against the platform's own documentation on 22 September 2026.

The number everyone quotes

Etsy's help centre asks for listing photos with a width and height of at least 2000 pixels. It also notes that your first photo should be at least 635 px, or the listing shows up lower in search. Both are easy to clear if you are exporting from Photoshop rather than a phone.

What trips people up is the file size limit that sits beside it: images over 1 MB may not finish uploading, particularly on a slow connection. A 2000 px JPEG at quality 11 or 12 usually lands well under that. A 2000 px PNG of a photographic room scene often does not — which is a good reason to export listing photos as JPEG and keep PNG for artwork with flat colour or transparency.

The part that matters more: shape

Etsy crops your listing image into three different thumbnail shapes — square, portrait and landscape — depending on where it appears across the site. Its guidance is blunt about what to feed that process:

“Avoid square crops. Upload horizontal or landscape images.”

Etsy Help Centre, Requirements and Best Practices for Images in Your Etsy Shop

The reasoning is geometric. A landscape image has room on the left and right that can be trimmed away when Etsy needs a square or a portrait. A square image has no such margin: cropping it to portrait eats into the sides of the subject, and cropping it to landscape takes a slice off the top and bottom. Etsy's own wording is that a horizontal picture “uses more of the available space within the thumbnail frame”.

Etsy still accepts square as a valid shape for the first photo — it says “horizontal (landscape) or square”. Square is not against the rules. It is simply the shape with the least margin for the crops Etsy is going to apply.

What this means for mockups specifically

A mockup of framed wall art in a room is almost always a wide scene: a sofa, a table, a stretch of wall. Squaring it throws away the parts of the room that made the scene look like a home in the first place, and it leaves the frame filling most of the crop.

• Export landscape, with room around the frame. 2000 × 1600 keeps the scene and still clears the 2000 px minimum on the long side. If you want to clear 2000 px on both sides, 2400 × 2000 does it.
• Keep the artwork near the centre. Everything Etsy crops, it crops towards the middle. A frame pushed to one edge of the scene can disappear from the square thumbnail entirely.
• Use the same shape for every photo in the listing. Etsy says the first photo dictates the shape of the rest, and mixing shapes makes the gallery jump around as the buyer scrolls.
• Check the thumbnail tool before publishing. Etsy's listing editor previews all three crops. It takes ten seconds and it is the only way to see what a shopper will actually see.

A note on 72 PPI

You will see “72 PPI” repeated in Etsy size guides. PPI is a print instruction stored in the file's metadata; it has no effect on how an image is displayed on a screen. A 2000 × 1600 image is 2000 × 1600 whether the file claims 72 PPI or 300. The only number that changes what Etsy shows is the pixel count.