Three numbers cover almost everything. Export at 1080 pixels wide. Use 4:5 (1080 × 1350) for feed posts, because it is the tallest shape the feed accepts and takes the most screen. Use 9:16 (1080 × 1920) for Reels and Stories. The feed will accept anything between 1.91:1 landscape and 4:5 portrait untouched, and will crop anything outside that window.
Instagram is quietly opinionated about pixels. It accepts a narrow band of aspect ratios without complaint, silently crops everything outside it, re-encodes every file that arrives, and covers a predictable set of regions in Reels and Stories with its own interface. None of that is announced while you are uploading. You find out afterwards, when the top of your headline has gone.
This page is the complete reference: every size that matters, the safe zones measured in pixels, what happens to files that fall outside the accepted window, and an export checklist. The image and video size checker will tell you what your specific file will do before you upload it, without the file leaving your browser.
The three numbers that decide everything
1080 pixels wide. This is the working width for every image surface on Instagram. Exporting narrower than 1080 gives the app less to work with and shows on a modern phone screen. Every corrected export the size checker produces is 1080 pixels on its long-standing side for exactly this reason.
4:5 for the feed. A 4:5 portrait image is 1080 × 1350 and occupies more vertical screen than any other permitted feed shape. More screen means more time in view before a thumb moves it along. There is no downside to it and it is the default answer for a single feed image.
9:16 for full-screen. Reels and Stories are 1080 × 1920. Anything else gets letterboxed, pillarboxed or cropped, and the crop is not one you get to choose.
The most misunderstood point in this section
The feed does not have “a size” — it has a window. Anything from 1.91:1 landscape (wide) down to 4:5 portrait (tall) posts without a forced crop. A 3:2 photograph straight out of a camera is 1.5:1, comfortably inside that window, and needs nothing done to it. The crop only appears when you go wider than 1.91:1 or taller than 4:5, which is why panoramas and 9:16 exports both lose material in the feed.
The complete size reference
| Surface | Aspect ratio | Export size (px) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feed — portrait (recommended) | 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 | Tallest the feed accepts; most screen space |
| Feed — square | 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 | Safe everywhere, including the profile grid |
| Feed — landscape | 1.91:1 | 1080 × 566 | Widest the feed accepts without cropping |
| Feed — camera photo | 3:2 or 4:3 | 1080 × 720 / 1080 × 810 | Inside the accepted window; no crop forced |
| Reels | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Interface covers the top, bottom, right and lower-left |
| Stories | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Progress bars at the top, reply bar at the bottom |
| Carousel — every slide | 4:5, 1:1 or 3:4 | 1080 × 1350 / 1080 × 1080 / 1080 × 1440 | All slides must share one ratio |
| Profile photo | 1:1 | Square source, 320 × 320 or larger | Displayed as a circle; corners are always lost |
| Profile grid thumbnail | Set by Instagram | Centre crop of your post | Instagram has changed this crop before — check your own profile |
Feed posts: why 4:5 is the default answer
A square post and a 4:5 post are the same width on screen. The 4:5 post is 25% taller. On a vertical scrolling surface, height is dwell time, and dwell time is the only currency the feed deals in. There is no compensating disadvantage: 4:5 does not get cropped, does not display oddly, and does not need a different export pipeline.
The one thing to watch is the profile grid. Your posts appear twice — once in the feed at full ratio, once as a thumbnail in your grid, cropped to whatever shape Instagram is currently using for grid cells. That crop is centred, so a 4:5 image with its subject at the very top or bottom can look decapitated on your profile even though the feed version is perfect. Compose with a little breathing room and it is a non-issue.
If you are checking a specific file rather than reading a table, drop it into the size checker. It reports the exact intrinsic dimensions, the simplified aspect ratio, whether the feed will crop it, how many pixels would be lost and from which edges, and it will export a corrected crop at the target size with a focal point you position yourself. Anything over 35% loss is flagged as a heavy crop rather than a minor one. The complete image sizes and aspect ratios spec covers the same ground in more depth.
Carousels: one ratio for the whole set
Instagram takes the aspect ratio of the first slide and applies it to every slide in the carousel. Slides that do not match get cropped to fit. This is the single most common carousel mistake — a set of nine images where the first is 4:5 and the rest are square, which produces eight silently trimmed slides.
Pick a ratio, export every slide at exactly those dimensions, and put the one you are most confident about first. 4:5 at 1080 × 1350 is the usual choice for the same reason it wins in the feed.
Seamless panoramas
A seamless carousel is one wide image cut into panels so that swiping between them feels like panning across a single picture. The maths has to be exact: if the panel edges land on fractional pixels, you get a visible seam or a one-pixel shimmer at every join.
The carousel splitter handles this by scaling the source once into a single canvas and then cutting on integer pixel boundaries. It takes 2 to 10 panels at 4:5, 1:1 or 3:4, and every panel comes out 1080 pixels wide regardless of ratio — so a five-panel 4:5 set is cut from a 5400 × 1350 render. You can download the panels individually or as a ZIP, and the whole operation happens in your browser. How to make a seamless Instagram carousel walks through the design side, including where to place a subject so it does not land on a join.
The most misunderstood point in this section
Design your panorama for the panel, not for the wide canvas. Nobody sees the full image. They see one panel, then another, each on its own, with a swipe in between. A composition that only reads when all five are side by side reads as five confusing fragments in the feed. Every panel needs to survive on its own.
Reels and Stories: 9:16 and what covers it
Both are 1080 × 1920. The complication is not the size, it is that Instagram draws its own interface on top of your content, and that interface is opaque. Text placed under it is simply not readable.
These regions are observed from the app rather than published by Instagram, and they shift slightly between app versions, phone models and whether a device has a notch or a home indicator. Treat them as generous margins rather than exact boundaries. The figures below are the ones the safe zone checker overlays, expressed against a 1080 × 1920 frame.
Reels
| Region | Position | In pixels (1080 × 1920) |
|---|---|---|
| Status bar and top row | Top 7% of the height | Top 134 px, full width |
| Caption, audio strip and CTA | Bottom 20% of the height | Bottom 384 px, full width |
| Action rail (like, comment, share, menu) | Right 14%, from 20% to 82% down | x 929–1080, y 384–1574 |
| Profile row on the left edge | Left 10%, from 66% down | x 0–108, y 1267–1920 |
Stories
| Region | Position | In pixels (1080 × 1920) |
|---|---|---|
| Progress bars and header | Top 11% of the height | Top 211 px, full width |
| Reply bar | Bottom 13% of the height | Bottom 250 px, full width |
| Tap-back dead zone | Left third, between the header and reply bar | x 0–356, y 211–1670 |
| Tap-forward dead zone | Right third, between the header and reply bar | x 724–1080, y 211–1670 |
The Story tap zones are a different kind of hazard from the others. Nothing is drawn over them — your design is fully visible — but a tap in the left third goes back and a tap in the right third goes forward. Put an interactive sticker, a poll or a “swipe up” prompt there and a meaningful share of viewers will dismiss your Story while trying to use it. The centre column is the only region where a tap does what the viewer intended.
The safe zone checker lets you drag a rectangle representing your text block over both frames at once and tells you which specific overlays it collides with, so you can position a title card without guessing. Where your text gets covered has the full walkthrough.
The most misunderstood point in this section
Safe zones are not a design grid Instagram publishes. They are measured from what the app actually draws, and they move — a new app version can add a row of buttons, and a phone with a taller status bar shifts the top margin. This is why the margins here are deliberately generous and why the only real test is opening your own draft on your own phone before you publish.
Image & Video Size Checker
See whether your file posts clean or gets cropped, and fix it to spec with a focal point you control.
Reels & Stories Safe Zone Checker
Overlay the buttons, captions and progress bars that cover your design, and test whether your text survives.
Carousel Splitter
Cut one wide image into seamless swipeable panels at 4:5, 1:1 or 3:4, then download them individually or as a ZIP.
Instagram Grid Planner
Arrange up to 18 images in a real 3-column grid, reorder by drag or keyboard, and export the plan as one PNG.
The profile grid and how posts look together
Your profile is the second place every post appears, and it is the first place a new visitor forms an impression. Individually strong posts can still make an incoherent grid — three high-contrast images in a row, or four posts in the same colour clustered in one corner.
The grid planner lays out up to 18 images in a real three-column grid so you can see the next six rows before you commit to a posting order. You reorder by dragging or with the keyboard, and it exports the whole plan as a single PNG at 540-pixel cells with a 6-pixel gutter. Everything is held in your browser’s local storage, so your plan survives a page reload and never touches a server.
One caveat worth stating plainly: the planner uses square cells. Instagram has changed the shape of its profile grid cells before, and may again. If your profile currently crops to a different shape, treat the planner as a composition and colour-balance tool rather than a pixel-exact preview.
Compression: why your export looks worse after upload
Every image and video uploaded to Instagram is re-encoded. This is not optional, it is not something a setting turns off, and it is why a file that looked immaculate in your editor can arrive with soft gradients and blocky edges. The specifics — which encoder, at what quality, with what triggers — are not published by Instagram, so everything below is observed behaviour rather than documentation.
What consistently helps:
- Export at exactly 1080 pixels wide. Supplying the width the app works at means one fewer resampling step before the re-encode.
- Use sRGB. Files in wider colour spaces frequently come back with shifted, duller colour after conversion.
- Export JPEG at high quality, or PNG for flat graphics. Uploading a heavily compressed JPEG means the platform re-compresses artefacts that are already there.
- Avoid fine gradients and thin type in busy areas. Smooth gradients band and one-pixel strokes crumble. Larger, heavier type survives.
- Upload over a stable connection. Some apps have historically reduced quality on weak connections; whether that still applies is not something anyone outside Instagram can verify.
You will also read that exporting at 1440 pixels wide produces a cleaner result than 1080. Plenty of people report that; plenty of others cannot reproduce it. It is folklore, not spec, and it changes with app versions. 1080 is the width the tools here target because it is the width Instagram’s own surfaces are built around.
Video: length, ratio and what the checker can tell you
For video, aspect ratio matters as much as it does for images and duration matters more. The size checker reads a video’s metadata — width, height and duration — straight from your browser’s own decoder, entirely locally. It deliberately does not re-encode, resize or trim anything; that is a job for a video editor, and a tool that claimed to do it in a browser tab would be doing something else.
| Property | Target | What happens otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| Reels ratio | 9:16 (0.5625) | Narrower than 9:16 is trimmed top and bottom; wider is pillarboxed or side-cropped |
| Reels resolution | 1080 × 1920 | Lower resolution is upscaled and looks soft on a modern screen |
| Reel length | Around 90 seconds is the common working cap | Longer clips are available on many accounts up to about 3 minutes |
| Story segment | 60 seconds | Longer video is automatically split into consecutive segments |
| Landscape video | Avoid for Reels | A 16:9 clip loses roughly 68% of its width in a 9:16 frame |
Reel length limits have changed repeatedly and vary by account, so the checker flags anything over 90 seconds as longer than the common cap rather than as invalid. If you are cutting for full-screen playback, reframe in the editor rather than letting Instagram choose the crop — the automatic crop is centred, and the subject of a landscape shot rarely is.
An export checklist
- Decide the surface first. Feed, carousel, Reel or Story. The ratio follows from that, not the other way round.
- Export at 1080 wide and the matching height from the reference table.
- Convert to sRGB before export.
- Check the file in the size checker. If it reports a crop, fix it there with the focal point where you want it rather than letting the app centre-crop.
- For 9:16, check your text against the safe zone overlays — both the Reels rail and the Story tap zones.
- For carousels, confirm every slide is identical in dimensions, and that panel joins land on integer pixels if the set is seamless.
- Plan the grid position in the grid planner if the profile view matters to you.
- Preview on a phone before publishing. Every measurement on this page is an approximation of what a real device does. The device is the authority.
Once the pixels are right, the text is the other half of the job — caption limits, bio line breaks and hashtags are covered in the captions, bios and hashtags guide, and what to measure afterwards is in the Instagram analytics guide.
What is the best image size for an Instagram post?
1080 × 1350 pixels, a 4:5 portrait. It is the tallest shape the feed accepts without cropping, so it occupies the most screen space as someone scrolls. 1080 × 1080 square is the safe alternative if you care about how the profile grid looks.
What aspect ratios does the Instagram feed accept?
Anything from 1.91:1 landscape at the wide end down to 4:5 portrait at the tall end. Inside that window nothing is cropped. Wider than 1.91:1 loses the left and right edges; taller than 4:5 loses the top and bottom.
What size are Reels and Stories?
1080 × 1920 pixels, a 9:16 ratio, for both. The difference is what Instagram draws on top: Reels have an action rail down the right and a caption block along the bottom, while Stories have progress bars at the top and a reply bar at the bottom.
Where exactly are the Reels safe zones?
On a 1080 × 1920 frame: keep clear of the top 134 pixels, the bottom 384 pixels, a 151-pixel column down the right side between 384 and 1574 pixels from the top, and a 108-pixel column on the left below 1267 pixels. These are measured from the app, not published by Instagram, and they shift a little between versions and devices.
Why do the left and right thirds of a Story matter?
Nothing is drawn over them, but a tap in the left third goes back to the previous Story and a tap in the right third skips forward. Anything a viewer is meant to tap — a poll, a sticker, a prompt — belongs in the centre column, or people will dismiss your Story trying to use it.
Do all carousel slides need the same aspect ratio?
Yes in practice. Instagram applies the first slide’s ratio to the whole set and crops everything that does not match. Export every slide at identical dimensions, and lead with the slide you are most confident about.
How do I make a seamless carousel without visible seams?
Scale the wide source image once, then cut the panels on exact integer pixel boundaries — fractional edges are what produce the visible seam. The carousel splitter does this in your browser for 2 to 10 panels at 4:5, 1:1 or 3:4, with every panel coming out 1080 pixels wide.
Why does my image look worse on Instagram than in my editor?
Because every upload is re-encoded, and the details of that encoding are not published. Exporting at exactly 1080 pixels wide, in sRGB, at high JPEG quality reduces how much work the platform has to do. Fine gradients and hairline type suffer most.
Should I export at 1080 or 1440 pixels wide?
1080 is the width Instagram’s surfaces are built around and is the safe answer. Some people report better results at 1440, others cannot reproduce it — it is observed folklore rather than documented behaviour, and it changes between app versions.
Does the size checker upload my files anywhere?
No. It reads the image or video with your browser’s own decoder, inside the page you are looking at. Nothing is transmitted, and for video it reads metadata only — width, height and duration — without re-encoding a single frame.