How to post a whole photo on Instagram with white borders
Instagram crops photos that are too wide or too tall. How to add white or coloured borders so the whole picture fits in a square, portrait or story frame.
Published
Tools for this job: Instagram Image Resizer · Crop Image · Compress Image
Instagram accepts photos within a range of shapes, from a fairly wide landscape to a 4:5 portrait. Anything outside that range is cropped when you post it: a panorama loses its ends, a tall phone screenshot loses its top and bottom. Adding borders, usually white, makes the whole picture fit and gives a feed a tidy, consistent look.
Choose the frame
| Frame | Pixels | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Square | 1080 × 1080 | Consistent grids, mixed shapes |
| Portrait | 1080 × 1350 | Most space in the feed |
| Landscape | 1080 × 566 | Wide scenes |
| Story or Reel | 1080 × 1920 | Full-screen vertical |
Portrait takes up the most screen space as people scroll, so a landscape photo padded to a 4:5 portrait frame is smaller but still uses the space. Square is the classic choice if you want every post to line up.
Add borders step by step
- Open the Instagram Image Resizer and add your photo.
- Choose a frame: Square post, Portrait post, Landscape post or Story or Reel.
- Choose the framing option Fit and pad. The whole photo is fitted inside the frame.
- Set the padding colour. White is classic; black suits night shots; a muted tone can match a theme.
- Download and post. Instagram has nothing left to crop.
Even borders on every side
Fit and pad adds borders on two sides only: top and bottom for a wide photo, left and right for a tall one. Some people prefer a thin border on all four sides, like a print with a mount. To get that, crop a sliver from the photo's longer side first in Crop Image so it is slightly smaller than the frame's shape in both directions, then pad. A simpler alternative is to accept two-sided borders, which most feeds use.
Why the photo looks soft after posting
Instagram resizes everything to 1080 pixels wide and compresses it again. Uploading exactly 1080 pixels wide gives the app less reason to resize and usually keeps the result sharper. The resizer already outputs 1080-pixel images. Avoid uploading an image you have already compressed heavily: two rounds of compression show as smeared detail and blocky skies. The guide to why photos look blurry after uploading covers the other causes.
Carousels
In a carousel post, every slide takes the shape of the first one. If you mix portrait and landscape photos, pad them all to the same frame before uploading so none of them is cropped.
Stories
Stories are tall: 9:16. A normal landscape photo on a story sits as a small band in the middle. Fit and pad on the Story format gives you control of the background colour; leave room at the top and bottom, where the app puts your name and the reply bar.
The full set of sizes is in Instagram image sizes. For borders on profile pictures elsewhere, see setting a full photo as a WhatsApp profile picture.