Every format at a glance
- Feed, portrait — 1080 × 1350 (4:5). The largest footprint Instagram allows in feed. This is the default worth using unless you have a reason not to.
- Feed, square — 1080 × 1080 (1:1). Safe and predictable, but occupies less screen than 4:5.
- Feed, landscape — 1080 × 566 (1.91:1). The smallest feed footprint. Useful for wide photography, weak for reach.
- Reels — 1080 × 1920 (9:16). Full-screen vertical video.
- Stories — 1080 × 1920 (9:16). Same frame as Reels.
- Profile grid preview — 3:4 crop. Not an upload size. This is how your posts are cropped in the profile grid.
- Profile photo — 320 × 320, displayed as a circle. Upload larger and square; it is downscaled.
Every one of these is 1080 pixels on the short edge. Uploading wider does not gain you anything — Instagram re-encodes to its own targets regardless, which is also why a downloaded copy can never exceed what the platform published. That mechanism is covered in why Instagram downloads look blurry.
The grid crop is the thing most people get wrong
Instagram changed the profile grid so that posts preview at 3:4 rather than the old square. That creates a mismatch worth planning around: you post at 4:5, but the grid shows a 3:4 slice of it.
Practically, that means a 4:5 portrait post gets trimmed at the top and bottom in the grid view. Anything critical — a face, a headline, a logo — should sit toward the vertical centre of the frame so it survives both the full-size 4:5 view and the cropped 3:4 preview. Text placed near the very top or very bottom of a 4:5 image is the most common casualty.
If grid consistency matters to you more than feed footprint, posting square at 1:1 sidesteps the issue entirely at the cost of screen presence.
Safe areas for Reels and Stories
The 9:16 frame is full-screen, but a meaningful portion of it sits underneath interface elements. Instagram's own UI overlays the top and bottom of the frame:
- Top of frame — profile row, sound attribution and the Stories progress bars.
- Bottom of frame — caption, username, audio ticker, and the action buttons on the right edge.
- Right edge — like, comment, share and menu controls stack vertically.
The reliable approach is to keep essential content within the middle band of the frame and treat roughly the top eighth and bottom quarter as decorative. Captions burned into the very bottom of a Reel are routinely hidden behind the interface, which is the single most common export mistake in vertical video.
Carousels: pick one ratio and commit
A carousel uses a single aspect ratio for every slide — the ratio of the first image. Mixing a portrait first slide with square later slides means the later ones get letterboxed or cropped to match.
Export every slide at the same dimensions before uploading. If you are working the other direction and trying to retrieve all slides from an existing public carousel, use the carousel downloader rather than the image tool — the reason is explained in carousel vs single image.
File formats and practical limits
- Images — JPEG or PNG. PNG is worth using for graphics with flat colour and text; JPEG for photographs.
- Video — MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio is the safest combination.
- Frame rate — 30fps is universally safe; higher frame rates are commonly re-encoded down.
- Colour — export in sRGB. Wide-gamut profiles frequently shift on upload, which is why colours sometimes look duller after posting.
Uploading a file that already matches Instagram's target dimensions means the platform re-encodes once rather than resizing and re-encoding. That single step is the most reliable quality improvement available to a creator, and it costs nothing.
Why quality drops even at the right size
Instagram compresses every upload. Matching the target dimensions avoids an extra resampling pass, but it does not avoid compression. Three things make the result visibly worse:
- Uploading on a weak connection, which can cause a lower-quality encode to be published permanently.
- Re-uploading something already compressed — a repost, or a clip that has been through a messaging app. Generational loss stacks.
- Wrong aspect ratio, forcing a scale operation before encoding.
A note on where these numbers come from
Instagram does not publish a single authoritative specification page, and it changes behaviour without announcement — the grid preview crop is a recent example. The values here reflect current observed behaviour and are reviewed when we see them change. If something on this page no longer matches what you are seeing, we would genuinely like to know: get in touch.
Related tools
- Image downloader — save a public photo at its largest published size
- Carousel downloader — every slide in an album
- Profile picture downloader — full-size, not the thumbnail
- كل الأدلة