Instagram Image Sizes

Every size in one table

Placement	Size	Ratio
Portrait post	1080 × 1350	4:5
Square post	1080 × 1080	1:1
Landscape post	1080 × 566	1.91:1
Story	1080 × 1920	9:16
Reel cover	1080 × 1920	9:16
Profile picture	320 × 320	1:1

Everything is 1080 pixels wide. That is not a coincidence — Instagram displays at 1080 and downscales anything larger, so 1080 is the number that matters.

Portrait posts take more space, and space is attention

If you post one ratio, make it 1080 × 1350.

The feed is a vertical scroll. A 4:5 portrait post occupies about 25% more vertical space than a square, which means it stays on screen longer as someone scrolls past. That is more time for the image to register and more time to read the caption preview. It costs nothing.

Landscape is the weakest choice for the same reason — it occupies the least screen and disappears fastest.

The one thing to watch: your profile grid still shows square thumbnails. A portrait post is centre-cropped to a square there, so keep the important content away from the top and bottom edges if the grid layout matters to you.

Why Instagram makes your photos look worse

Instagram re-compresses every upload. You cannot prevent that, but you can stop making it worse.

Upload at exactly 1080 pixels wide. Uploading a 4000 pixel photo means Instagram downscales it with its own algorithm, tuned for speed rather than quality, and then compresses the result. Downscaling it yourself first with the image resizer gives a visibly sharper outcome — you control the resampling and hand Instagram something it barely has to touch.

Do not pre-compress heavily. Compressing to quality 60 before upload means Instagram compresses your artefacts. Upload at quality 85 or above and let its encoder work from clean material.

Prefer JPG for photographs. Instagram converts everything to JPEG anyway. Uploading a PNG of a photograph just means a large upload that gets converted regardless.

Graphics with text suffer most. Flat colour and lettering are what JPEG handles worst, and Instagram’s compression is aggressive. If you post text-heavy graphics, keep the text large and high-contrast; fine lettering will not survive.

Cropping deliberately

Instagram will crop for you, centred, with no idea where your subject is. For anything you care about, crop it yourself.

Set the crop tool to your target dimensions — 1080 × 1350 for a portrait post — and frame it by eye. The output is exactly those dimensions, so there is nothing left for Instagram to decide.

If you are posting the same image as a portrait post, a square, and a story, the social media sizer produces all three at once and hands you a ZIP.

Stories and Reels: the safe zone

Stories are 1080 × 1920, but the top and bottom of that frame are covered by interface — your profile bubble and the caption at the top, the reply box and action buttons at the bottom.

Keep anything important within roughly the central 1080 × 1420. As a rough rule, leave about 250 pixels clear at the top and bottom. Text placed at the very bottom of a story is routinely hidden behind the reply field, which is one of the most common and most avoidable mistakes.

Profile pictures

The upload is 320 × 320, displayed as a circle and often rendered at 40 pixels or smaller in comments.

Frame tightly — head and shoulders, not a full body. Uploading larger than 320 does no harm and gives some headroom if Instagram changes the size. The profile picture maker does the circular crop with a transparent background so you can see exactly what will be visible.

Photos from an iPhone

If your photos are HEIC files, Instagram’s app handles them, but anything else in your workflow — a scheduling tool, a desktop upload, a design app — may not. Convert them to JPG first if you are working outside the app.

Also worth knowing: Instagram strips metadata from uploads, so your location data is not published through Instagram. That protection does not extend to the same photo shared by email, message or on your own website. The EXIF viewer shows what a file is carrying.

Where to confirm

Instagram adjusts these periodically and rolls changes out gradually, so different accounts sometimes see different behaviour. For anything critical, check Instagram’s own help pages. This guide is not affiliated with Instagram or Meta.