Five numbers cover almost everything. The part that catches people out is that the feed and the profile grid do not use the same shape.
Last updated: August 2026
| Where | Pixels | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Feed — portrait | 1080 × 1350 | 4:5 |
| Feed — square | 1080 × 1080 | 1:1 |
| Feed — landscape | 1080 × 566 | 1.91:1 |
| Story / Reel | 1080 × 1920 | 9:16 |
| Profile picture | 320 × 320 | 1:1 |
Use 1080 × 1350 unless you have a reason not to. It is the tallest shape the feed allows, so it occupies the most screen as someone scrolls past. Square and landscape still post fine; they just take up less room.
Stories and Reels are the same 9:16 frame. Keep anything you need people to read away from the top and bottom — roughly 250 pixels at each end sits under Instagram's own interface.
This is the part that surprises people. Your post appears in two places with two different crops: in the feed at the ratio you uploaded, and on your profile grid at 3:4 — taller and narrower than 4:5. Instagram centre-crops to get there, and it never asks.
How much you lose off each side, by what you uploaded:
| You upload | Grid keeps | Trimmed each side |
|---|---|---|
| 4:5 portrait | 93.8% of the width | about 3% |
| 1:1 square | 75% of the width | 12.5% |
| 1.91:1 landscape | 39% of the width | about 30% |
What to do about it: keep faces, logos and text out of the outer edges of the frame. On a square that means a comfortable margin; on a landscape photo it means accepting that the grid will show you the middle third and nothing else.
It also means a landscape shot is close to a wasted grid tile. If the profile page matters to you, shoot and export portrait.
A carousel holds up to 20 photos and videos. Two rules do most of the work:
Splitting one wide photo across several slides so a swipe reveals it is a separate craft with its own traps — the order gotcha in particular. That has its own guide: how to split a panorama into a carousel or grid.
Instagram re-encodes what it receives and serves it around 1080 pixels wide. Upload a 4000-pixel-wide file and their servers resample it — you have no say in how.
You cannot switch that off, but you can stop it happening twice. Export at exactly the target size, so the picture is resized once by you, deliberately, instead of once by your editor and again by Instagram. Fine detail, small text and hard edges are what suffer when it happens twice.
Upload JPG or PNG. Skip filters and re-saves in other apps between your export and the upload — each pass is another round of compression.
Every tool here exports straight into these ratios, in your browser, with nothing uploaded to a server: