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Most advice about Facebook profile photos gives you one number and stops. That is the problem: Facebook does not display the photo at one size. It displays it at three, and the one people see most often is the one almost nobody designs for.
Count where your photo actually appears over a week. Once on your profile, where somebody has to go deliberately. Hundreds of times at 36 pixels, beside everything you post and every comment you leave. The thumbnail is the real profile photo. The large version is the exception.
Facebook accepts a minimum of 180 × 180 px but that is a floor, not a target. Upload a square at 720 × 720 px or larger. The extra resolution costs nothing and keeps the image sharp on high-density screens, where a 170-pixel display slot is actually rendering 340 or 510 physical pixels.
Uploading at exactly 170 × 170 produces a photo that looks acceptable on an old monitor and soft on every modern phone.
You upload a square; Facebook displays a circle cut from the middle of it. The four corners — about 21% of the area — are discarded.
This is where square logo lockups fail. A logo designed to sit in a square, with the wordmark tucked into the lower right, loses the wordmark entirely. Before uploading, draw a circle inside your square and check that everything you need is inside it, with a visible margin rather than touching the edge.
This is the part worth real attention, and the rules are harsh.
Text does not survive. At 36 pixels a company name is a grey smudge. One letter can work. Two, sometimes. A word, never.
Detail does not survive. A fine illustration, a thin outline, a gradient with subtle steps — all of it merges. What reads at 36 pixels is a strong shape with high contrast and few elements.
Faces need to be close. For a personal profile, a photo where your head fills most of the frame reads at thumbnail size. A nice picture of you standing in a landscape does not — at 36 pixels you are three pixels tall.
The test takes ten seconds and is the only one that matters: shrink your image to 36 × 36 and look at it. If you cannot identify it, nobody scrolling past will either.
The mechanics are the same, the strategy is not.
A personal profile wants a face, cropped close. People recognise faces at sizes where they recognise nothing else.
A Page usually wants a mark rather than a full logo — the symbol without the wordmark, or a single initial. Many organisations maintain a separate square “avatar” version of their identity for exactly this reason, and if yours does not, cropping the symbol out of the full lockup is usually better than shrinking the whole thing.
One practical note for Pages: on the desktop layout the profile photo overlaps the cover photo’s lower-left area. Keep that corner of the cover clear.
Transparency is pointless here — the circle is filled against a background you do not control, so design against a solid colour instead.