Instagram Image Size for Every Placement

The Instagram image size you want is 1080 pixels on the short edge, in one of three ratios: 4:5 for feed posts, 1:1 for square, 9:16 for Stories and Reels. Everything else on Instagram is one of those three with a different crop applied on top.

One upload, every size exported. That is faster than remembering the table.

A vertical feed gives each post a fixed width and whatever height its ratio implies. A 4:5 post is therefore 25% taller than a square one at the same width — a quarter more screen, a quarter longer in view before the thumb moves on.

The trade-off is the grid: portrait posts are cropped to squares in the profile grid, so a composition with the subject at the very top or bottom looks decapitated there. Compose for 4:5 with the subject inside the central square and both views work.

Instagram applies the first slide's ratio to the entire carousel. Add a square slide to a 4:5 carousel and it is letterboxed or cropped; the mistake is invisible in your editor and obvious in the feed.

If you are splitting a wide image across slides so it reads as one panorama, the alignment has to be exact or the seams show:

See Instagram carousel size and how to cut a seamless one.

The cover appears full-height at 9:16 when the Reel is playing, and as a cropped tile in your profile grid. Those two crops share very little area, which is why so many covers have the title cut in half on the profile.

The cropper shows both crops at once so you can position the subject where it survives each. Detail: Instagram Reels cover size.

A Story is 9:16, but the top carries the profile row and progress bars, and the bottom carries the reply field and any stickers. Text placed in those bands is covered on some devices and clear on others.

The safe regions per device are in Instagram Story size and the zones you cannot use, and the cross-platform version is safe zones.

Everything in a profile grid is square, whatever ratio it was posted at. That gives every portrait post two lives: the feed view it was composed for, and the square crop a visitor sees when they land on your profile.

Channels that care about the grid solve this in one of two ways. Either they compose 4:5 with the subject inside the central square - so the crop takes only empty space - or they accept the crop and treat the grid as a texture rather than a gallery. What does not work is centring a subject in the bottom third of a portrait image and then wondering why the profile shows a chin.

The same logic applies to Reels, which appear in the grid as a vertical tile rather than a square one, and to carousels, where only the first slide is ever shown there.

Export as JPEG for photographs and PNG for anything with flat colour or text. Meta publishes its own creative specifications for the placements it sells advertising on (Meta Business Help), and organic posts follow the same geometry. Instagram recompresses everything, so an oversized upload is downscaled by their algorithm rather than yours — which is the usual cause of "my image looks soft on Instagram but fine on my laptop".

More: how to compress an image for Instagram and WebP vs JPEG vs PNG.

Instagram's ratios are the same ratios everywhere else, which is the useful thing about learning them once — 9:16 is a Story, a Reel, a TikTok and a Short. The full cross-network reference is social media image sizes.

Export every Instagram size from one file with the social image resizer.