Instagram Photo Editor

The three formats that matter

Instagram accepts a range of ratios but treats them differently in the feed:

• 1080 × 1350 (4:5) — the tallest the feed displays uncropped, so it takes the most screen space as people scroll. The default worth using for most posts.
• 1080 × 1080 (1:1) — square. Safe everywhere, and still what the profile grid crops to.
• 1080 × 1920 (9:16) — stories and reels, full screen.
• 1080 × 566 (1.91:1) — landscape. Occupies the least feed space of any option.

Your grid crops everything to square

This is the detail that catches people: a 4:5 post displays tall in the feed but is cropped to a square thumbnail on your profile grid, from the centre.

So a portrait post needs to work twice — as the tall version people see while scrolling, and as the centre square people see when they visit your profile. Keeping the subject centred rather than at the top or bottom edge is what makes both work.

Safe zones in stories and reels

Vertical formats have interface drawn over them. Keep anything important out of the top 250 pixels, where the profile row and progress bars sit, and the bottom 250 pixels, where the caption, reply field and action buttons appear.

For reels specifically, also avoid the right-hand strip where the like, comment and share column lives. Text placed there is readable in your editor and covered on the phone.

Why uploads look worse than your export

Instagram recompresses everything, which is a second lossy pass on top of yours. Three things genuinely reduce the damage: upload at exactly the target dimensions so their resize is a clean downscale, export at high quality (90+) rather than pre-compressing, and never upload an image that was already downloaded from another platform.

Fine detail, dense texture and thin lines are what a second compression pass destroys first, so a simpler composition survives the trip better than a busy one.