Instagram image sizes, and how to stop Instagram ruining your photos
The sizes Instagram uses for posts, Stories and Reels, why uploads come out soft or cropped, and how to prepare pictures so they stay sharp.
Published
Tools for this job: Instagram Image Resizer · Crop Image · Circle Crop Image
A sharp photo goes in, a slightly soft one comes out, or the top of someone's head is missing. Instagram resizes and re-compresses everything that does not match its own sizes, and that second round of processing is what softens text and turns smooth skies blocky. Supplying the exact size avoids most of it.
The sizes
| Format | Shape | Pixels |
|---|---|---|
| Square post | 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 |
| Portrait post | 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 |
| Landscape post | 1.91:1 | 1080 × 566 |
| Story or Reel | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 |
Feed posts are stored 1,080 pixels wide. A picture with a different shape is cropped or given borders to fit the nearest allowed shape, and a much larger picture is scaled down.
Which shape to choose
Portrait, at 1080 × 1350, takes up the most room in the feed on a phone, which is why so many accounts use it. Square is the safe all-rounder. Landscape posts appear small in the feed and are best kept for pictures that genuinely need the width, such as panoramas.
Fill and crop, or fit and pad?
The Instagram Image Resizer offers two ways to get a picture into a shape:
- Fill and crop scales the picture until it covers the frame and trims the overflow. Right for most photographs.
- Fit and pad scales the picture until all of it fits, and fills the rest of the frame with a colour you choose. Right for graphics, screenshots, quotes and anything with text near the edge, where cropping would cut words off.
For precise control over what stays in a cropped photo, crop it first with Crop Image — pick the 1:1 or 9:16 preset, or type pixel values in the 4:5 proportion such as 1080 × 1350 — then resize.
A worked example
Take a landscape phone photo of 4000 × 3000 pixels and post it as a 1080 × 1350 portrait.
- Fill and crop scales the photo until it covers the frame: the height becomes 1350, so the width becomes 1800, and 720 pixels — 40% of the width — are trimmed from the sides. Fine for a single subject in the middle; not for a group photo.
- Fit and pad scales the photo until all of it fits: the width becomes 1080 and the height 810, leaving 540 pixels of padding split above and below. Nothing is lost, at the cost of bands of colour.
For a landscape photo where everything matters, the landscape post shape is often the better choice than forcing it into a portrait frame.
Stories and Reels: mind the edges
In a Story or a Reel, the top of the screen carries the profile name and progress bar, and the bottom carries the reply box, captions and buttons. Anything important placed there — a headline, a face, a price — can end up hidden. A practical rule is to keep text and key subjects out of roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels of the 1920-pixel frame, and to check the result on a phone before posting.
Carousels
In a carousel post, every picture is shown in the same shape — normally the shape of the first one. Prepare them all at the same size, so none is cropped unexpectedly.
Keep quality as high as possible
- Supply the exact size. A picture that already matches Instagram's size is processed less.
- Check the app's upload quality setting. Instagram has an option to upload at the highest quality in its media quality settings; some apps reduce quality to save mobile data unless it is switched on.
- Use standard colours. Pictures edited in a wide colour space can shift when uploaded. Exporting in sRGB keeps colours predictable.
- Avoid tiny text. Text that is crisp on a computer screen may be hard to read on a phone in the feed. Larger, bolder type survives compression better.
Profile pictures
Instagram displays profile pictures as a small circle, cropping the corners of whatever square you upload. Keep the face or logo centred with space around it, so nothing important falls in the corners. A square image is all Instagram needs; for a round version to use elsewhere — on a slide, a document or a printed badge — Circle Crop Image cuts the circle with a transparent background.
Other platforms
The square and 4:5 portrait sizes work well in most feeds, and the 1080 × 1920 Story size matches the vertical video formats used across other apps. Each platform changes its layouts from time to time, so check how a post looks on a phone before relying on any size for important material.