Instagram Post and Story Sizes in 2025: Every Dimension in Pixels

Instagram accepts feed images in any shape between 1.91:1 (wide) and 4:5 (tall) and stores them at a width of up to 1080 px. That gives three practical sizes. The square, 1080 × 1080 px, is the original Instagram shape and still the safest choice for logos, quote cards and product shots that need equal room on every side. The portrait, 1080 × 1350 px, takes the most vertical space in the feed, which is why most creators use it for people, food and fashion. The landscape, 1080 × 566 px, keeps a wide scene intact but appears as a thin strip between taller posts.

Anything outside that range gets trimmed. A photo straight from a phone camera is usually 3:4 (4032 × 3024 px turned upright) or 9:16 for screenshots and video frames, and both are taller than 4:5. The app then asks you to pinch and drag inside its crop window, and whatever falls outside the 4:5 frame is gone from the post. Wider-than-1.91:1 panoramas lose their sides the same way. Cropping before upload puts that decision back in your hands, and it is the only way to apply the same crop to a whole set of photos.

If you only need the common 4:5 portrait, the Instagram post size page has 1080 × 1350 px filled in already. The cards below show each feed shape to scale, together with the 3:4 preview that the profile grid has used since early 2025.

For more than a decade the profile grid showed every post as a square thumbnail, so creators planned 1:1 crops even for portrait photos. In January 2025 Instagram switched the grid to rectangular 3:4 tiles, the same shape a phone camera captures. Some guides now recommend uploading 1080 × 1440 px posts to match. Be careful with that advice: the feed itself still displays posts at a maximum of 4:5, and Instagram has not documented 3:4 as a feed upload size in the way it documents 4:5. A 3:4 upload may be cropped back to 4:5 in the feed, which is the opposite of what you wanted.

The safer plan is to keep exporting at 1080 × 1350 px and design with the grid in mind. A 4:5 post shown in a 3:4 tile loses a narrow strip on the left and right, roughly 34 px per side at full size, while the post opens in full when tapped. Keep faces, product edges and text a little away from the side edges and the grid preview looks deliberate. Older square posts are shown in the 3:4 tile too, so they get trimmed top and bottom: a grid of 1:1 quote cards may need a quick check after the change.

Stories and Reels both fill the phone screen at 1080 × 1920 px, a 9:16 frame. You can upload other shapes, but Instagram then zooms the picture to fill the screen or adds a blurred or colored background around it. Most phone videos are already 9:16 when shot upright, so the main job for video is trimming and compression rather than resizing. Still images for Stories, such as announcements or a poster, are worth exporting at exactly 1080 × 1920 px so nothing gets scaled twice.

The full frame is not all usable. The top of a Story carries the progress bar, your profile picture and username, and the bottom holds the reply field and send buttons. Reels put captions, the audio label and the like, comment and share buttons over the lower part and the right edge. The common rule is to keep about 250 px at the top and bottom free of text and key details, which leaves a central area of roughly 1080 × 1420 px. On Reels also leave around 120 px on the right side for the button column.

A Reels cover follows the same 1080 × 1920 px frame, but you rarely see it whole. The profile grid crops it to the center tile, a square for years and a 3:4 rectangle since the 2025 grid change, and the feed shows Reels cropped toward 4:5. Put the title and the subject of a cover in the middle third so that every crop keeps them.

The profile picture is the smallest image you upload and the one shown most often: beside comments, in the Story ring and on follow requests. Instagram stores it at 320 × 320 px and draws it as a circle, so the square corners never appear. Upload a square at least that size with the face or logo centered, and leave some room around it, because a circle cuts off about 21% of a square's area at the corners. For a ready-made square, use Instagram profile picture size, which has 320 × 320 px and a centered crop set up.

Carousels hold up to 20 photos or videos since Instagram raised the limit from 10 in 2024. The rule that trips people up is that the first item sets the shape for the whole post. If slide one is 4:5 and slide three is a square, slide three gets cropped to 4:5 in the app, often slicing off the very part you wanted to show. Mixed shapes from different cameras make this worse.

The fix is to decide one ratio for the whole set before you upload and resize every slide to it in one batch. Panoramas split across several slides follow the same logic: cut them into equal 1080 × 1350 px sections so the seams line up when someone swipes.

Instagram does not publish one tidy spec sheet, and the numbers in its help center change from time to time. The table collects the limits that its help pages and most up-to-date guides agree on in 2025. Treat the video figures in particular as ceilings, not targets: a 4 GB upload from a phone on mobile data takes a long time and gets compressed hard anyway, so a well-encoded file of a few hundred megabytes usually looks the same once it is live.

For photos, JPG is the format to use. PNG is accepted, but Instagram converts every image to JPG on its servers, so a large PNG gains nothing but upload time. HEIC photos from an iPhone are converted by the app as you post. For video, MP4 or MOV with H.264 video and AAC audio is the most dependable combination, and frame rates above 60 fps are reduced. If you want to check a limit before an important launch, the Instagram Help Center is the official reference.

Every image you post is recompressed. Instagram serves billions of images a day to phones on slow connections, so it scales each upload to its own storage size and re-encodes it as a JPG at a quality it chooses. You cannot switch that off. What you can control is how much work the app has left to do. If you upload a 4000 px wide photo, Instagram's own downscaler resizes it and then compresses it, and fine text and thin lines suffer from both steps. If you upload exactly 1080 px wide, the app skips the resize and only re-encodes.

Color matters as well. Instagram expects sRGB. A file exported in Adobe RGB or Display P3 from a camera or editing app can look dull or shifted once it is converted, especially in reds and greens. Export in sRGB from your editor and the colors you see on screen are the colors your followers see. Keep sharpening modest; heavy sharpening plus Instagram's compression produces halos around letters.

The last control is JPG quality. Quality 80 to 90 is the useful range: high enough that the second compression does not stack visible blocks onto the first, low enough that the file uploads quickly. Avoid upscaling small images to 1080 px, because enlarging adds soft pixels that compression then smears further. The scale below shows how each quality setting tends to behave on Instagram.

Doing this one photo at a time in the Instagram app is slow and inconsistent: each pinch-and-drag crop is a little different, and the app gives you no pixel numbers. A browser resizer handles a full carousel at once with identical settings. The image resizer takes up to 20 images per batch, 95 MB per file, which matches the 20-slide carousel limit, and accepts JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP and AVIF. Nothing needs to be installed and files are deleted 30 minutes after processing.

The key setting is Fit. Crop to fill fills the frame and cuts off whatever does not match the ratio, with Crop position deciding which part survives. Pad with color keeps the whole photo and adds borders in a Pad color you pick, which is the clean way to post a wide shot in a 4:5 frame without the app cropping it. For more on choosing a ratio and composing the crop, see how to crop an image to a ratio.

Black or blurred bars are the most common complaint. They appear when a landscape video or a 16:9 screenshot goes into a 9:16 Story, or when a 3:4 photo is padded inside a frame by a third-party app. Instagram is filling space your file did not cover. Either crop to the target ratio before upload or pad with a color that belongs to the design, so the bars look intentional rather than accidental.

The second is cut-off heads. A portrait cropped to 4:5 with the face near the top edge can lose the top of the head in the 3:4 grid preview, and a group photo cropped to a square for an older layout can lose people at the sides. Leave headroom above faces and keep subjects away from the edges. The third is blurry slides from oversized exports: a 12 MB original does not post sharper than a 1080 px JPG of a few hundred kilobytes, and if another platform caps the file size as well, reducing an image's size in KB is a separate step from getting the dimensions right.