TikTok Slideshow Size: Dimensions, Limits & Why Text Blurs

Definition

TikTok slideshow size refers to the image dimensions and limits for TikTok's Photo Mode — the format behind photo carousels and slideshows. The core spec: each image should be 1080×1920 pixels in a 9:16 vertical aspect ratio, a single post can contain up to 35 photos, and each photo can be up to 20MB (JPG or PNG, with WebP generally accepted). THE FULL SPEC SHEET Dimensions: 1080×1920 pixels (9:16 portrait). This matches the full TikTok screen, so correctly sized images display edge-to-edge with no cropping or letterboxing. Images in other ratios (square 1:1, landscape 16:9) are displayed with blurred or solid padding above and below, which reads as low-effort and measurably hurts swipe-through. Photo count: 1 to 35 images per post. Most high-performing slideshows use 5-10 slides — enough to reward swiping, short enough to hold completion. File size: up to 20MB per image. In practice you should export far smaller — around 100KB-500KB per slide — because TikTok recompresses everything on upload, and giving it a lean, already-optimized file produces a cleaner recompression than handing it a 15MB original. Format: JPG for photographs, PNG for graphics and text-heavy slides. PNG preserves hard text edges better before TikTok's compression pass. WHY YOUR TEXT BLURS AFTER EXPORT (AND THE FIX) Blurry text is the most common slideshow quality complaint, and it almost always comes from one of three causes. First: uploading images that aren't 1080×1920, forcing TikTok to scale them — any scaling pass softens text edges, and upscaling small images destroys them. Second: adding text in an app that renders it at preview resolution rather than export resolution (or screenshotting your own draft), so the text was soft before TikTok ever touched it. Third: relying on TikTok's own text overlay tool for dense text — platform recompression treats overlay-heavy frames unkindly, and overlay text can't be positioned reliably against the UI. The fix is one rule: bake your text into the image at full 1080×1920 export resolution. Design the slide in an editor (Canva, Figma, Photoshop — anything that exports true-size), render the text as part of the image, and export at exactly 1080×1920. Baked-in text at native resolution survives TikTok's compression sharp. This is also why serious slideshow creators never screenshot their drafts: a screenshot is capped at your device's screen resolution and often picks up UI chrome. SAFE ZONES: WHERE TIKTOK'S UI COVERS YOUR SLIDES TikTok's interface overlays every slideshow: the caption, username, and audio row sit over roughly the bottom 320 pixels; the like/comment/share/bookmark rail occupies roughly the rightmost 120 pixels; and system UI plus the 'Search' affordance take roughly the top 150 pixels. Any text or key visual placed in those bands will be partially covered on most devices. Keep essential text inside the central safe area — as a rule of thumb, a centered column about 1080×1400 starting ~150px from the top — and treat the outer bands as background-only space. This is the second-biggest cause of 'unreadable' slideshows after blur: the text was sharp, but the UI sat on top of it. SLIDESHOW SIZE VS TIKTOK VIDEO SIZE The dimensions are identical — TikTok video is also 1080×1920 at 9:16 — so assets designed for slideshows are reusable as video frames and vice versa. The differences are in limits: videos are constrained by duration (up to 10 minutes recorded in-app, up to 60 minutes uploaded) and bitrate, while slideshows are constrained by photo count (35) and per-image file size (20MB). One monetization-relevant distinction: Photo Mode posts are excluded from TikTok's Creator Rewards Program, which only pays for original videos over one minute — so identical creative earns differently depending on which format carries it. PREPPING SLIDES AT SPEC, FREE You can hit the full spec without paid software. OpenClip's free image tools handle the two fiddly steps in-browser with just an account: the Resize Image tool (openclip.app/tools/resize-image-online) fits any image to exactly 1080×1920, and the Compress Image tool (openclip.app/tools/compress-image-online) brings heavy exports down to fast-loading file sizes without visible quality loss. Design the slide, resize to spec, compress, upload — text stays sharp and nothing gets cropped.