What the Instagram Size Guide Covers and How to Use It
Upload a photo at the wrong size and Instagram crops it, squashes it, or softens it with heavy compression — this guide helps you avoid all of that by using the correct pixel dimensions for every format. It is a clean reference you can copy from in seconds, covering feed posts, stories, reels, carousels, and profile photos with their exact sizes and aspect ratios.
Start with feed posts. Square posts are 1080 × 1080 pixels (1:1), the classic look. Portrait posts are 1080 × 1350 pixels (4:5) and are widely recommended because they take up the most vertical space in the feed, making your content harder to scroll past. Landscape posts are 1080 × 566 pixels (1.91:1) for wide, horizontal images. Whatever the shape, Instagram displays at a maximum width of 1080 pixels, so exporting at that width keeps things sharp without wasting file size. Stories and reels both use a full-screen vertical canvas of 1080 × 1920 pixels (9:16). For reels, keep important text and faces centered, because the edges can be covered by the caption, profile icon, and action buttons, and the reel cover shows in your feed grid at a 1080 × 1350 crop. Carousels should keep every slide at the same aspect ratio — usually 1080 × 1350 for portrait — so the swipe experience stays consistent and nothing gets unexpectedly cropped mid-carousel. Profile photos display as a small circle, so a simple 320 × 320 image centered on your subject works well.
Here is how the numbers behave in practice. Look up the story size and you get 1080 × 1920 px at 9:16 — divide 1080 by 1920 and you get 0.5625, which is 9 divided by 16, confirming the ratio. Build at that size and the canvas fills a phone screen edge to edge with nothing cropped. Now look up the portrait feed size and you get 1080 × 1350 px at 4:5. That works out to 1080 ÷ 1350 = 0.8, exactly 4 ÷ 5. The practical consequence is height: at the same 1080 width, a portrait post is 1350 pixels tall against a square post's 1080, so it occupies about 25% more vertical space in someone's feed and takes noticeably longer to scroll past. That difference is the single easiest visibility gain available to you, and it costs nothing but choosing a different canvas.
The people who need this are usually about to make something. A designer building a five-slide carousel in Figma has to set the frame size before drawing anything, and mixing 1:1 and 4:5 slides mid-carousel is a mistake you cannot fix after posting. A café owner shooting product photos on a phone wants to know whether to hold it vertically. A video editor exporting a reel needs the 9:16 timeline set correctly in Premiere or CapCut before the first cut. A brand manager writing a spec sheet for a freelance photographer needs exact pixel numbers rather than a vague ask for social sizes.
A few practical habits make a big difference. Always export at 1080 pixels wide, save as high-quality JPG or PNG, and design with the 4:5 portrait ratio when you want maximum feed real estate. Instagram compresses everything on upload, so starting from a clean, correctly sized file gives the best final result. These dimensions reflect current 2025 specifications; platforms adjust their layouts over time, so it is worth double-checking before a major campaign. Tap any size to copy it and drop it straight into your design tool. The mistake that catches most people is exporting a 4000-pixel-wide file thinking bigger is safer; Instagram scales it down to 1080 and applies compression to the resized result, which softens fine text far more than exporting at 1080 in the first place. The other common trap is putting captions or logos in the top and bottom 250 pixels of a reel, where the interface buttons sit — they look fine in your editor and are unreadable in the app. This page is a reference that runs in your browser, so nothing you look up or copy is uploaded or tracked.
