Instagram Post Size Ratio: Plan One Photo for Feed, Grid and Stories

A single picture can appear in four different shapes on Instagram without you ever editing it. People scrolling the feed see the post at the ratio you chose when sharing it. Visitors to your profile see a preview tile that is cut from the middle of the post. If you share the same photo to your story, it sits inside a tall 9:16 screen with the profile name at the top and the reply bar at the bottom. And if it becomes a reel cover, it is shown at yet another size. Each of those views trims or covers a different part of the image.

Most advice on this topic is a list of pixel sizes, one per placement. That works if you are willing to make four versions of every photo. The approach here is the opposite: decide once where the subject goes, export one file, and let each placement cut what it likes from the edges. To do that you need to know the frame each placement uses and how much of your photo it throws away, which is what the sizes below and the sections after them cover.

The numbers come from Instagram's own Help Center and, for stories, from Meta's Ads Guide, which is the only place Meta publishes margins for the story screen. Ads and ordinary posts appear on the same screens, so the ad margins are a fair guide for any story, even though they are written for advertisers.

Instagram's help article on image resolution sets the rule for feed photos. A photo is kept at its own width up to 1080 pixels; anything wider is scaled down to 1080, and anything narrower than 320 pixels is enlarged to 320. The shape has to fall between 1.91:1, a wide landscape, and 3:4, a tall portrait. A photo outside that range is cropped to the nearest supported ratio. Earlier versions of the same page ended the range at 4:5, so older guides that call 1080 × 1350 the tallest post are describing the previous rule.

Because the width is fixed at 1080, the ratio decides only the height, and the height decides how much of the phone screen the post fills as people scroll. A 3:4 post at 1080 × 1440 is a third taller than a square and more than two and a half times taller than a full landscape. That is why portrait posts tend to win attention in a feed: they simply occupy more of the screen for longer. The Instagram post size tool starts from 1080 × 1350, the 4:5 shape that Meta's feed ad specs also use, and changing the height to 1440 gives you the full 3:4 frame.

There is a second reason to prefer 3:4. Most phone cameras save photos at 4:3, which held upright is exactly 3:4. A photo straight from the camera therefore needs no cropping at all for the tallest feed shape, while every other choice cuts something away. The cards below compare the three portrait-friendly options at 1080 pixels wide.

Your profile shows posts three to a row as preview tiles. For most of Instagram's history those tiles were square, which meant every portrait post lost its top and bottom on the profile page. In January 2025 Instagram switched the grid to tall rectangles. Instagram's Help Center does not state the exact tile shape, but most coverage of the change describes it as 3:4, and the arithmetic below assumes that. The tile is cut from the center of the post, so whatever sits near the edges is what disappears.

With 3:4 tiles, a 3:4 post appears whole in the grid. A 4:5 post keeps its full height but loses about 6 percent of its width, roughly 34 pixels at each side of a 1080-pixel image. A square post loses a quarter of its width, about 135 pixels at each side, so a name or logo placed near the left or right edge of a square graphic can vanish from the grid. A full 1.91:1 landscape keeps only the middle 39 percent of its width, which is why wide group photos often look like a close-up of one or two people on a profile page.

None of this changes the post itself. Anyone who taps a tile sees the full photo at the ratio you shared. The grid matters because it is the first impression of your profile, and a grid of tiles with half-cut faces or clipped words looks careless even when every post is fine on its own.

Stories and reels fill the phone screen at 9:16, and Instagram draws its own controls on top of them: your profile picture and name across the top, the reply field and buttons along the bottom. For reels, the help page on reel sizes accepts anything from 1.91:1 to 9:16 at a minimum of 720 pixels and recommends a cover of 420 × 654 pixels. For stories, the clearest published numbers are in Meta's Stories image ad specs, which recommend 9:16 at 1440 × 2560 and ask advertisers to keep roughly 14 percent of the top, 35 percent of the bottom and 6 percent of each side free of text, logos and other key elements.

Those margins are larger than most people expect. On a 1080 × 1920 story frame they come to about 269 pixels at the top, 672 pixels at the bottom and 65 pixels at each side, leaving a clear area of roughly 950 × 979 pixels in the upper middle of the screen. Anything you want people to read, such as a caption written on the image, a price or a face, belongs inside that area. Background can run to the edges; the interface will simply sit on top of it.

When you share a feed photo to a story, Instagram places the whole photo on the story screen and lets you pinch and move it. A 3:4 photo is wider than the 9:16 screen, so filling the screen with it cuts a quarter of its width. The next section turns these numbers into one safe area for the original photo.

Put the three cuts together and a safe area appears in the original 3:4 photo. A full-screen story keeps the middle 75 percent of the width, and its side margins take a little more, so anything important should sit within the middle two-thirds of the width. Vertically, the story covers the top seventh and everything below roughly the two-thirds line. The feed and the grid never cut more than that from a 3:4 photo, and a square crop, if you ever need one, removes only the top and bottom eighths. A subject inside that box survives every placement without a second edit.

That box is roomier than it sounds. It is the middle of the frame shifted slightly upward, which is where most people place a subject anyway. What it rules out is the habit of putting a face or a line of text right at the top edge, or letting a product sit along the bottom. It also means leaving some empty background around the subject when you shoot, because the margins are what each placement cuts. If you want to see exactly what a given crop costs before you commit, the guide on how much of a photo survives each crop works through the shares for every common ratio.

Once the photo is framed, export one file: a JPG at 1080 × 1440 pixels for a 3:4 post, or 1080 × 1350 if you prefer 4:5. Going wider than 1080 pixels gains nothing, because Instagram scales it down anyway, and a file at exactly the stored size gives the app no reason to resample or crop it again. Your phone's own editor can crop to the right shape, and if the photo already has the right shape you can upload it as it is and let Instagram scale it.

On a laptop, or when you have a batch of photos to prepare, do it in two steps. First crop the photo with the aspect ratio locked to 3:4 portrait or 4:5 portrait, moving the box so the subject sits in the safe area. Then resize it to 1080 pixels wide; with both sides set and Fit on Crop to fill, every file in the batch comes out at exactly the same size. If a photo cannot lose anything, Pad with color places the whole picture inside the frame with plain bars instead.

Before you upload, check one setting in the app. Instagram's reel help page describes an Upload at highest quality switch under the Media quality settings; with it off, the app may send a lighter version of your file on a slow or metered connection.

A carousel holds up to 20 photos and videos, according to Instagram's help page on posts with multiple photos, and the orientation you choose, square, portrait or landscape, applies to all of them. Slides with another shape are cropped to match, which is where a carefully framed photo can lose its subject. The same page notes that you cannot add photos to a carousel once it is shared, so getting the set right before posting matters more than it does for a single photo.

The simplest fix is to crop every slide to the same ratio before you open the app, using the safe area for each one. If the set mixes upright and sideways photos, square is the shape that hurts both least; if it is all upright phone photos, 3:4 keeps every one complete. For a set where one picture has to show several photos side by side, a single combined image can work better than a carousel, and the guide on merging photos into one image or one PDF explains when each output fits. Whatever you choose, keep the first slide strong: it is the one the grid tile is cut from.