What Size Is a Ghost Feature Image?

Make a Ghost feature image 1200x630, a 1.91:1 landscape, and keep the subject centered. Ghost has no special size of its own, so you borrow the share-card shape, because that same file becomes your og:image the moment the post goes live. That is the whole answer; the rest is why, and how to keep a theme crop from clipping it.

Ghost calls it the feature image, singular, and it does double duty. It is the picture at the top of the post and on the index card, and it is the image a platform reads when someone shares the link. One file, two jobs. So “what size is a Ghost feature image” feels like it should have a Ghost-specific answer, and it does not. It is the 1200x630 card again, with one wrinkle Ghost adds: the theme gets to crop it.

1200x630, borrowed from the share card

Ghost does not publish a feature-image size at all. It takes whatever you upload, caps the width at 2000 px, and generates the smaller responsive sizes itself, so your only job is to hand it one large, wide file. There is no “Ghost size” to chase, the way you might chase a 1080x1080 Instagram square.

What there is, is the share card. When you publish, Ghost writes your feature image straight into the post’s og:image and X card by default, with no extra step. That card has a shape the whole web agreed on years ago: 1200x630, the de-facto 1.91:1. So you design for the share card, export it wide and large, and the feature image rides along on the very same file. One file, sized once, doing both jobs.

The theme decides the crop

Here is the wrinkle. A theme rarely shows your feature image uncropped. It slots the one file into a hero band, an index card, an email header, and those slots are its own shapes. Casper crops one way, a magazine theme another. Ghost itself only scales the file down; the cropping is the theme’s CSS, deciding which part of it you see in each place.

That trips people up, because a cropped feature image looks like a sizing failure and is not one. You upload a clean 2000-wide image, the theme zooms into the middle, your title in the corner vanishes, and you assume you need a bigger file. You re-export at 3000 wide. It does nothing. A crop cuts the same proportions no matter how many pixels feed it.

The fix is composition. Keep the subject and any words in the center, and let the outer edges carry only background you can afford to lose. A face, a logo, a headline - hold it in the middle, where every theme crop still keeps it. A gradient, grain, an out-of-focus wash - that can run to the edge and get sliced without anyone noticing. Compose it centered once, in Lede or anywhere, and you stop re-exporting against a crop you cannot control.

Build one wide file, keep the subject centered, and let the theme crop fall where it likes.

Ghost’s separate social card

Sometimes the feature image is the wrong picture for the share card, or you want different words on it. Ghost lets you split them. Open a post’s settings and you will find a Facebook card and an X card section, each with its own image, title, and description. Set a dedicated 1200x630 there and that is what the link preview uses, while the feature image keeps doing its job inside the post.

You do not need this most of the time. If your feature image is already a centered 1.91:1, the default reuse is exactly right and a separate card is busywork. Reach for the override only when the feature image is an awkward shape for a card, or when the headline that works on the post would not work as share text. One gotcha worth knowing: Facebook caches the card on publish, so if you swap it later, you may have to nudge its sharing debugger to pick up the change.

Feature image vs content image

One more thing people tangle. The feature image is not the same as the pictures inside your post.

The feature image is the post’s image - one per post, the one that shows in the feed, the card, and the link preview. A content image is something else: a picture you place in the body with Ghost’s image card, which can sit regular, wide, or full-width. You can have one feature image and a dozen content images, and they answer to different rules. If your goal is the share card, the feature image is what fills it, not a content image. The pictures in the body never become your og:image.

A quick checklist

• Make the feature image 1200x630 at 1.91:1 - it doubles as your share card.
• Keep the title and any faces in the center band, so a theme crop does not clip them.
• Export it large and wide for retina screens; Ghost caps the upload at 2000 px wide and builds the smaller sizes from there.
• Save it as WebP to keep it light; Ghost compresses and resizes whatever you upload anyway.
• Only set a separate 1200x630 card in post settings if the feature image is off-ratio or needs different share text.
• Remember the feature image is the post’s image - content images in the body are a separate thing.

If you want the spec behind that 1200x630 line, open graph image size covers the share card in full, and social image sizes for bloggers lays out what each feed actually crops. The names trip people up too, so featured image vs cover image vs OG image untangles those, and the blog cover sizing guide is the pillar for the broader question.

I made the cover for this post in Lede at 1200x630, then exported it as a WebP in one click. When you want to make your own Ghost feature image, open the editor - it has a preset for the 1200x630 card, a gallery of templates to start from, and the 2x export built in. Build one wide file, keep the subject centered, and Ghost does the rest.