Steam Avatar Formatter

About Steam avatars

Steam avatars are square: 184×184px on the profile and 32×32px in chat and lists. The resizing here applies high-quality smoothing, precisely so detail isn't lost in the small versions.

You get a lossless PNG back. Send it straight to your Steam profile and it's accepted without any re-processing.

All the processing stays on your computer.

Steam's visual ecosystem: storefront, library, community, and Workshop

Steam is no longer a single storefront with a list of games. Over the past decade Valve has layered visual surfaces on top of each other: the classic store page with its rotating capsules, the redesigned library with parallax hero art and animated logos, the community profile with showcases and animated avatars, and the Workshop where modders and creators publish thumbnails for every mod, collection, and guide. Each of those surfaces has its own grid, its own pixel density, and its own art rules — and the same source image often has to be re-cropped four or five times to look correct in every context.

For developers and publishers, the storefront capsules are the most public face of a game. A 460×215 small capsule appears in search results, recommended widgets, "people also bought" carousels, and the top-of-store best-seller lists. A 616×353 main capsule shows up in the homepage hero carousel only for featured titles. The 374×448 vertical capsule is reserved for sale events, seasonal banners, and the daily deal grid. If any of those capsules ship with the wrong aspect ratio, Steam will stretch or letterbox them — and a stretched logo on the front page of the store is the kind of detail that costs conversions.

The library experience added a second tier of assets in 2019 when Valve relaunched the client. The 600×900 library capsule replaces the small horizontal capsule when a user owns the game; the 3840×1240 library hero is the parallax background of the per-game details page; the 1280×720 library logo floats on top of that hero and moves independently as the user scrolls. Together they give the library a console-storefront feel — but only if all three pieces are designed as a system, with a transparent PNG logo, a wordless hero that bleeds beyond the safe area, and a capsule that re-uses the same key art without recycling it verbatim.

On the community side, the visual layer is driven by players, not publishers. Avatars are uploaded at 184×184 and resized down to 64×64 and 32×32 for the friends list and chat. Profile backgrounds, mostly earned as trading-card rewards, sit at 1920×620 with a 1438×810 detail variant. Artwork and screenshot showcases on the profile page use boxes of roughly 506×506 (or 266×266 for compact slots), and savvy users carve those boxes out of a larger background to create the "stitched showcase" effect that is so common on customized profiles. Workshop thumbnails, finally, follow a square 268×268 convention — small enough that any visual noise destroys readability in the grid.

Developer and publisher assets

The Steamworks documentation lists six mandatory store-and-library assets for every paid title, plus a handful of optional ones. The full set is roughly:

• Header capsule 460×215 (Valve also accepts the modern 920×430 retina version): the workhorse capsule used in search, recommendation rails and the wishlist UI.
• Main capsule 616×353 (or 1232×706 at retina): the homepage carousel slot, only displayed for featured games.
• Vertical capsule 374×448 (or 748×896 retina): sale grids, daily deals, seasonal events.
• Small capsule 231×87 (or 462×174 retina): top-sellers list, micro-thumbnails in lists.
• Library capsule 600×900: the portrait card that owners see in their own library.
• Library hero 3840×1240: the wide parallax background, with a critical 860×380 safe area where the logo overlay will sit.
• Library logo 1280×720 transparent PNG: the wordmark layered over the hero.
• Page background 1438×810: optional store-page wallpaper, auto-derived from a screenshot if not provided.
• Bundle header 707×232: only required if the game is sold in a bundle.

Player-side assets: avatars, backgrounds, showcases

For end users the math is simpler but the surfaces are more diverse. The avatar is square at 184×184; uploading anything larger is fine because Steam resamples down to 64 and 32 pixels, but the source should still be designed legible at 32×32 — that is the size your name appears at in voice chat and group messages. Profile backgrounds come in two flavours: the classic static 1920×620 and the newer animated mini-profile background. Showcase boxes accept square images of 506×506 (large) and 266×266 (compact), and the popular "background showcase" trick involves slicing a single 1920×620 image into multiple showcase squares so they read as one continuous artwork.

Steam Workshop thumbnails

Workshop items — mods, guides, collections, artwork submissions — are presented as a dense grid of square thumbnails. Valve's recommended size is 268×268 pixels at PNG or JPG, under 1 MB. Because the grid surrounds each tile with about 12 pixels of padding and a subtle drop shadow, designs that rely on edge-to-edge detail tend to look muddy; the safer pattern is a centered icon or wordmark on a flat or gradient background with at least 20 pixels of breathing room from the edge.

Why exact sizes matter

Steam's storefront is composited dynamically by the client. A capsule does not render as a standalone image — it is layered over a background colour, often stacked next to other capsules at slightly different pixel densities, and on Retina or 4K displays it is upscaled or substituted for its "@2x" sibling. When an asset arrives at the wrong resolution Steam falls back to bilinear scaling, which produces visible blur around fonts and logos. Worse, the cropping rectangles Valve uses to derive the small capsule from the main capsule, or the @1x from the @2x, only line up if the source image follows the documented aspect ratio exactly. A 462×175 image (one pixel off the spec) will be cropped, not scaled, and a thin strip of the artwork will simply disappear from the storefront.

Performance is the second reason. The Steam client preloads thousands of capsules when a user opens the store; serving a 4 MB hero where a 200 KB optimised PNG would do means a slower library page and, for users on slow connections, missing tiles. Most professional pipelines export capsules at the exact target dimensions and run them through pngquant or tinypng before upload.

Design best practices

• Keep text to the game logo only on capsules — Valve's review team rejects capsules with marketing copy, review quotes, or "Coming Soon" overlays.
• Do not put any text on the library hero; the logo is a separate layer and Steam composites them at runtime.
• Test your capsule against Steam's grey storefront background (#1b2838) and against the lighter library background; avoid pure white or pure black borders that visually merge with the chrome.
• Ensure the readable safe area of the library hero (the central 860×380) contains nothing critical — the parallax effect will crop the edges on smaller windows.
• Export at the exact pixel dimensions Valve specifies. Do not let Steam scale your art.
• Use sRGB; Steam does not honour embedded ICC profiles.
• For Workshop thumbnails, design at 268×268 but check legibility at 134×134 — that is the size used in the in-game subscription dialog.

Alternative tools

For one-off avatars and Workshop thumbnails an in-browser cropper like this one is the fastest path. For full storefront packages, most studios maintain Photoshop or Figma templates with smart objects sized to every Valve spec — Valve itself distributes a Dropbox folder of PSD/AI templates for partners. GIMP works too and has a free Steam capsule template floating around in community packs. For batch resizing the same source image into a full set of capsules, ImageMagick or a short Node script using sharp is hard to beat: convert input.png -resize 460x215^ -gravity center -extent 460x215 header.png and equivalents for every spec.

FAQ

What is the right avatar size for Steam? 184×184 pixels is the canonical upload size. Steam will resample it for the 64-pixel friends list and 32-pixel chat avatar, but you should design the artwork to remain readable at 32×32.

Does Steam accept animated avatars? Yes, but only for users with Steam Points to spend or with Steam Deck / VR perks. Animated avatars use APNG or short MP4, still framed at 184×184. Static PNG and JPG remain the default.

Why does my capsule look blurry on a 4K monitor? Because Steam is upscaling the @1x version. Always upload the retina (@2x) sibling at twice the documented dimensions — 920×430 for a header capsule, 1232×706 for a main capsule, and so on.

Can I include review quotes or "Coming Soon" on the capsule? No. Valve's graphical asset rules forbid marketing copy, review badges, awards, and "Coming Soon" overlays on the capsule images themselves. Those go in the description and the discount banner, which Steam draws on top of the capsule.

What format should I export in? PNG for assets with transparency (library logo, animated avatars) and JPG at high quality for everything else. File size cap is 1 MB per capsule for store assets and around 16 MB for the library hero, but smaller is always better for client load times.