Product Hunt Gallery: Screenshot Specs, Examples, and What Converts

Your Product Hunt gallery is the second thing a visitor looks at after the tagline, and the first image is the one that shows up in every embed, tweet, and share card. Get the gallery right and visitors stay long enough to upvote and click through. Get it wrong, with cropped text or a confusing first slide, and they bounce before they understand what you built.

Here are the exact specs, the order that works, and concrete examples of what to put in each slot.

The specs, get these exactly right

Product Hunt crops anything that does not match its aspect ratio, and it always crops the part you care about. Build to spec:

• Gallery image size: 1270 x 760 pixels (a 1.67:1 ratio). Design at this ratio even if you upload larger.
• Thumbnail: 240 x 240 pixels, square. This is your logo or icon, it shows on the leaderboard. Keep it legible at small size, no fine text.
• First gallery image = the hero. It appears in the post header, social embeds, and newsletters. This single image does the most work.
• Formats: PNG or JPG for stills, GIF or MP4 for motion. Keep GIFs under a few megabytes so they load instantly.
• Minimum 3 images, aim for 5 to 7. Enough to tell the story, not so many that people stop scrolling.

Our full asset specs cheatsheet has every dimension in one place, including the OG image and the video cover.

The image order that converts

Treat the gallery as a 6-slide pitch, not a screenshot dump. A reliable order:

1. Hero: the one-line value, shown visually. A clean product shot with a short headline overlay that repeats your core promise. This is the image that gets embedded everywhere, so it has to make sense with zero context.
2. The core action in the product. A real screenshot of the main thing your product does, annotated with a short caption. Show the software working, not an empty state.
3. Before / after or the outcome. The result the user gets. For a design tool, the finished design. For an analytics tool, the insight. Outcomes convert better than interfaces.
4. A demo GIF or short video. Motion dramatically increases time-on-post. 10 to 20 seconds of the actual workflow, no intro, no logo animation, straight into the product.
5. A secondary feature or integration. The second-most-important thing, or proof it fits into the tools people already use.
6. Social proof or a launch offer. A testimonial, a metric, or the "Welcome, Product Hunt, here's your launch discount" slide.

Examples of what goes in each slot

Concrete is better than abstract, so here is what each slot looks like for three kinds of product.

A developer tool:

• Hero: terminal or editor with a one-line headline like "Type-safe API clients, generated from your schema".
• Core action: the command running and the generated output side by side.
• Demo GIF: schema change to regenerated client in one motion.

An AI writing tool:

• Hero: split screen, prompt on the left, polished output on the right, headline overlay.
• Outcome: a real before/after of a rough draft becoming a finished piece.
• Demo GIF: highlighting text and watching it rewrite.

A no-code / internal tools builder:

• Hero: a finished dashboard with the headline "Build internal tools from your database in minutes".
• Core action: dragging a component and binding it to data.
• Outcome: the deployed tool a non-technical teammate is using.

The pattern across all three: hero states the promise, the middle proves it with real UI, the GIF shows the speed, and the last slide converts.

Common gallery mistakes that cost you upvotes

• Text that gets cropped. Keep important text in the center 80 percent, away from edges. Preview the crop before you publish.
• Marketing fluff instead of the product. Visitors want to see the software, not a stock photo of a team high-fiving. Show real screens.
• A busy first image. If the hero needs a paragraph to understand, it fails as an embed. One idea, one glance.
• No motion. A gallery of only stills underperforms one with a single good demo GIF. Motion is the cheapest conversion lift available.
• Dark screenshots of a dark UI. Low contrast reads as low quality at thumbnail size. Bump contrast or add a light frame.

Tools to build the gallery fast

You do not need a designer. Use your real product screens, add clean captions, and export at 1270 x 760. For the demo GIF, a screen recorder plus a GIF converter is enough, keep it short and trim dead time. Match every export to the specs cheatsheet so nothing crops, and check your tagline overlay against the tagline generator so the hero headline matches your post.

Before you upload anything, run your finished gallery through our free gallery & thumbnail checker — it shows your images the way a voter scrolling the leaderboard actually sees them, cropped thumbnail included, so you catch a bad crop or an unreadable caption before launch day instead of after.

FAQ

What size should Product Hunt gallery images be?

1270 x 760 pixels, a 1.67:1 aspect ratio. The thumbnail (your logo) is 240 x 240 pixels square. Design to these ratios so Product Hunt does not crop the important parts of your images.

How many images should a Product Hunt gallery have?

At least 3, ideally 5 to 7. Enough to tell the story: a hero, the core action, an outcome, a demo GIF, and a social-proof or offer slide. More than 7 and people stop scrolling.

Should I use a video or GIF in my Product Hunt gallery?

Yes, at least one motion asset. A 10 to 20 second GIF or video of the actual workflow increases time-on-post and conversion noticeably. Skip intros and logo animations, go straight into the product.

What should the first Product Hunt image be?

Your hero: a clean product shot with a short headline that repeats your core value. The first image is used in the post header and every social embed, so it must be understandable with zero context.

Do screenshots need captions on Product Hunt?

Short captions help. One line per image that says what the visitor is looking at and why it matters. Keep the text in the center of the frame so it is not cropped.

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Line up your gallery against the full asset specs, then finish the rest of your assets with the launch checklist. Both free, no signup.