Photographers know the difficulties of having to crop an image to a specific aspect ratio, and social media users are using this conundrum for a trend that is not exactly new.
If you have been on X (formerly Twitter) in the last couple of days then you will likely have spotted the following posts: “How do I fit this [photo] onto my header?” Followed by, “Nevermind, I figured it out.”
The first post will be of a photo with the crop tool set to X’s extremely wide aspect ratio for header images, 3:1. It will often be a vertical photo that is almost impossible to crop in 3:1.
The follow-up post, “Nevermind, I figured it out”, is done in the form of a retweet of the original post. And this is where the joke comes in. To see how they got the photo to fit, people have to click through to the profile where there is usually some sort of joke image that relates to the original post.
A common one that a lot of sports teams on X are doing is posting a photo of a player, or players, and when you click through to the profile page the header image is of a goat or goats. The joke is that the player is a GOAT (greatest of all time). See the Phoenix Suns example below.
More examples.
Old Jokes are the Best Jokes
If you are a close observer of internet humor, then you may know that this trend is nothing new. According to Know Your Meme, the ‘Twitter header won’t fit’ trend has been around since 2019 after it was started by Bailey Whitcomb who tweeted, “All I want in life is to take a photo where my boyfriend and I’s faces can both fit into my Twitter header.”
It has snowballed from there and has periodically gone viral ever since, despite many users’ protestations that the gag is old and boring.
But at the root of the joke is the age-old photography problem of cropping images. In an article for PetaPixel, Mike Smith called cropping the “single most important photo edit you can do.”