Split Image

The three modes answer different questions. Grid asks how many pieces you want and divides the picture equally: three rows and three columns make nine pieces of the same size, whatever the picture's dimensions. Tile size asks how big each piece should be in pixels and fits as many tiles as the picture holds, starting from the top-left corner. Carousel asks how many slides you want and cuts a wide picture into side-by-side pieces that each have a post-friendly shape.

Grid is the right choice when the count matters, such as a 3 × 3 profile layout or a poster that must fit on a fixed number of sheets. Tile size is right when the pixel size matters, such as 512 × 512 textures or map tiles of a fixed size for a web viewer; the default is 512 by 512 pixels, and any size from 16 pixels up can be typed in. Carousel is right for panoramas and long horizontal graphics that would be too small to read as a single post.

The grid overlay on the preview draws the cut lines on the first image as you change the numbers, so you can see whether an important detail, such as a face or a line of text, will fall exactly on a seam. If it does, change the number of columns or crop the picture first with the Crop Image tool so the subject sits inside one piece.

For a home-printed poster, count the sheets first. A picture split into two rows and three columns gives six pieces, one per sheet, and each piece should have the same shape as the printable area of the paper. Print every sheet at the same scale with no fit-to-page option, trim the white margins on the inner edges, and tape the pieces together from behind. Larger pictures with more pixels give a sharper result, since each sheet shows only a part of the original.

A carousel post shows one slide at a time and lets people swipe to the next. A panorama cut into slides of the same height turns into a continuous scene as they swipe, which keeps far more detail than fitting the whole width into a single small post. Slides sets how many pieces the panorama is cut into, from 2 to 6, and Slide shape sets their shape: 4:5 portrait takes up more of the screen in a feed, while 1:1 is the classic square.

To give every slide the chosen shape, the tool crops the panorama at the top and bottom as needed. A very wide picture loses little; a picture that is only slightly wider than tall loses more, and may work better as fewer slides. Keep the horizon and the main subject in the middle band of the picture so nothing important is cut away. Instagram's own help pages list the accepted shapes for feed posts, from 1.91:1 landscape to 4:5 portrait; Instagram Help has the current rules.

Think about where the cuts fall. Each slide is seen on its own for a moment, so a slide that contains only sky or an empty stretch of road looks like a mistake. Two to four slides usually work better than six for an ordinary panorama, because each one has more content and the swipe feels purposeful rather than repetitive.

When pieces are shown side by side again, on a profile page or on a wall, their edges have to line up exactly. Two things can spoil that. The first is lossy compression: JPG and WebP save each piece separately, and the encoder handles the edge pixels of each piece a little differently, which can leave a faint line where two pieces meet. That is why Quality starts at 90 here instead of the lower values used elsewhere, and why PNG output, which is lossless, never shows seams at all.

The second is resizing after the split. If a site scales your pieces down by a different amount, or crops them to another shape, the joins will no longer match. Make each piece the shape the site expects, and if the pieces must be a fixed pixel size, resize the whole picture to the right total size with the Resize Image tool before splitting, rather than resizing the pieces one by one afterwards.

Colors can drift too. If the pieces are saved with different color handling, neighboring tiles may look slightly different in brightness. Splitting from one source in one pass, with the same format and quality for every piece, keeps them consistent; avoid editing individual pieces afterwards, since an adjustment to one tile will stand out next to the others.

Download as ZIP is on by default and puts every piece in one ZIP file, numbered left to right and top to bottom. The numbering is what you follow when you reassemble or post the pieces, so keep the file names as they are. With ZIP off, each piece downloads on its own, which is handy when you only need one or two of them.

Output format can stay on Same as input or change to JPG, PNG or WebP. PNG keeps transparency and sharp edges and is the safe choice for graphics, screenshots and pixel art. JPG suits photos that will be posted online. Strip metadata removes GPS position, camera data and comments from every piece, and Auto orient turns a phone photo upright before splitting, so the pieces are cut and numbered in the order you see on screen.

Leftover edges only appears in Tile size mode. When the picture's width or height is not an exact multiple of the tile size, the last column and row are narrower or shorter than the rest. Keep smaller pieces returns them as they are, which is right for maps and pictures where every pixel counts. Discard drops them, which is right for sprite sheets and textures where every tile must be exactly the same size.

Splitting does not change the pixels inside each piece. In a 3 × 3 grid, every piece is one third of the original's width and one third of its height, showing its part of the picture at full detail. If a site then needs every piece at a particular size, that is a separate resize; doing it to the whole picture before the split, as described above, keeps the pieces matched.