RedNote (Xiaohongshu) cover sizes and ratios that work

Search for "RedNote cover size" and you will find a pile of conflicting numbers. The confusion comes from a real quirk: RedNote (Xiaohongshu) does not force your cover into one shape the way many platforms do. The ratio you choose changes how big your card is, how much attention it gets in the waterfall, and how your whole profile flows. Here is what actually matters.

The ratios RedNote displays

The key fact: RedNote's profile waterfall shows each note's cover at its real aspect ratio. There is no uniform crop — a tall cover renders as a tall card, a square cover as a short one, side by side in the same two-column feed.

Within that freedom, 3:4 vertical is the dominant convention. It is the tallest of the common shapes, which means the biggest card and the most pixels working for you in the waterfall. Squares (1:1) and landscape-ish 4:3 covers are allowed and display fine — they simply produce shorter cards that take up less vertical space: at the same column width, a 4:3 cover is only a little over half as tall as a 3:4 one (that is pure geometry — 0.75× the width versus 1.33×). That is why scrolling any popular feed shows mostly tall cards: creators converged on 3:4 because shorter cards concede screen real estate.

Recommended pixel sizes

For a 3:4 cover, two sizes in the same family cover every case:

• 1242 × 1660 — the standard high-resolution 3:4 cover size. Use this if your source photos are large.
• 1080 × 1440 — the same 3:4 ratio at a lighter weight. Convenient if your editing workflow is already built around 1080-wide exports.

The ratio matters more than the exact pixel count: anything sharp and genuinely 3:4 will look right. What to avoid is exporting a 3:4 design and then letting another app letterbox or re-crop it on the way out — verify the final file is still 3:4 before you upload.

Why title text is part of the cover

If you come from Instagram, this is the biggest cultural difference. On RedNote, the cover usually carries the note's hook text baked into the image itself — a short title or promise rendered as part of the design, not an overlay the app adds. The text below the card (the note title and author line) is separate; the words on the cover are yours to design, and successful covers treat them as the main event: big type, high contrast, a reason to tap.

Two practical rules follow. First, design the cover at its final 3:4 size so the text is composed for the shape it will display at — nothing is cropping it, but nothing is rescuing awkward placement either. Second, keep the text away from the edges. Cards sit close together in the waterfall, corners can be visually busy, and rounded card corners typically clip the extreme corners of the image — a comfortable inner margin keeps the hook fully readable at thumbnail size.

How cover ratio reshapes your profile

Because covers keep their real height, your ratio choice is also a layout choice. RedNote's profile is a two-column waterfall where each new card drops into whichever column is currently shorter — so a tall 3:4 cover extends its column further than a square one, which changes where the next card lands, which changes what sits beside what. Post a run of mixed ratios and the columns weave in ways that are hard to predict by intuition.

This is why many creators standardize on one ratio for everything: a profile of uniform 3:4 covers stays close to symmetric, while mixed heights produce a more staggered, magazine-like flow. Neither is wrong, but you should choose it rather than stumble into it. The full mechanics — placement rule, ordering, and why the bottom of the grid looks ragged — are covered in how the RedNote profile grid works.

Preview before you post

Since the cover's ratio decides both its own size and the shape of the profile around it, the only reliable check is to look at the waterfall with your actual covers in it. The FeedPeek preview tool does this in the browser: drop in your upcoming covers and it lays them out with the same two-column, shortest-column placement the profile uses, at their real ratios. You can reorder by drag to test how a tall cover reshuffles the columns. The iOS app goes further for RedNote — it renders the caption footer on each card and shows a full profile preview, so you see the page as a visitor would, title text and all.