Sprout Social’s Landscape optimizes images for the social web

Social media management tool Sprout Social today announces the launch of Landscape, a free tool that allows streamlined image resizing across the various social networks.

With so many different social networks commanding different ideal image sizes, the company found a need for an all-in-one solution that makes managing images across these various social networks a bit easier. Since these networks are forever changing, and the ideal image sizes, too, have needed to be changed on the basis of the evolution of the various sites images are posted to, the company felt it was necessary to keep marketers on the same page.

“Sprout’s goal is to provide solutions that continuously improve communication between people and brands,” Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social, said. “Images are a critical component of that effort and, when packaged in a professional way, elevate a brand’s social presence significantly and increase community engagement.”

The free tool is open to all and was motivated by a 2014 post that has been regularly referenced called Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes. The regularly updated article demanded a tool to meet the evolving needs of social media managers who wanted to stay current with the social networks and their image size requirements.

The tool is fairly straightforward to use.

1. The user uploads the image to the tool by dragging it onto the interface or by clicking the upload link.
2. The user chooses the social networks s/he would like to optimize the image for, then hits “next” when the networks are selected. Currently, the tool supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube, as well as custom sizing if needed.
3. The user chooses the sizes needed for each individual network. If the newly resized image is incompatible with the uploaded image, the tool will throw an error.
4. Finally, the user will be able to crop and scale the image for each network before hitting download. Auto-cropping is also supported if someone is in a hurry and doesn’t want to resize for each network individually, but it may be best to double-check that the cropping doesn’t remove any important elements.

Marketers need not access outdated articles (or in Sprout Social’s case, a constantly updated article) to find the ideal image size for their social network post. This tool is a welcome image utility for making sure everyone’s images look just great for the social networks they’d like to post to, and the tool works great.