Instagram Image Sizes in 2026: Posts, Stories, Reels and Profile

You spend an hour on a carousel, upload it, and the first slide looks fine in the feed. Then you open your profile and the headline is cut off at the top of the thumbnail. Nothing went wrong on your end. Instagram's grid stopped being square, and a lot of the sizing advice still floating around was written before that happened.

The correct Instagram image size in 2026 depends on which of two places you care about more: the feed, or the grid. For the first time in years there is a single number that satisfies both, and it is not the one most people are still using.

Here is every dimension that matters, what gets cropped where, and the export settings that survive Instagram's re-compression.

Instagram Image Size Cheat Sheet

Placement	Pixels	Ratio	Notes
Feed post — portrait (recommended)	1080 × 1440	3:4	Uncropped in feed and grid
Feed post — tall portrait	1080 × 1350	4:5	Trimmed slightly at the sides in the grid
Feed post — square	1080 × 1080	1:1	Trimmed top and bottom in the grid
Feed post — landscape	1080 × 566	1.91:1	Heavily cropped in the grid
Carousel (all slides)	1080 × 1440 or 1080 × 1350	3:4 or 4:5	First slide sets the ratio for the set
Stories	1080 × 1920	9:16	~250 px top / ~340 px bottom covered by UI
Reels cover and video	1080 × 1920	9:16	Grid shows the middle; caption sits low
Profile picture	320 × 320	1:1	Displayed as a circle, ~110 px on screen

Two rules do most of the work. Export at 1080 pixels wide, never more. And pick one vertical ratio and stay on it so your grid doesn't look like three different accounts.

What Changed: the 3:4 Grid, and Then 3:4 Posts

For most of Instagram's life the profile grid was square, so a 1:1 post was the safe choice — whatever happened in the feed, the thumbnail was exactly what you exported.

In 2025 Instagram redesigned the profile into a taller 3:4 grid. Every feed image is now centre-cropped into that shape for the thumbnail. A square post loses a band from the top and bottom. A 4:5 portrait loses a thin strip from each side, roughly 1013 pixels of a 1080-wide image survive. A landscape shot loses most of itself. The post is not altered — tap it and it opens at its original ratio — but the grid is what a new visitor judges first.

Shortly after, Instagram added 3:4 as a native upload ratio, on the reasoning that nearly every phone camera shoots 3:4 by default. That is the part that changed the answer. A 1080 × 1440 image now posts uncropped to the feed and matches the grid thumbnail exactly.

So the ranking today:

1. 1080 × 1440 (3:4) — no crop anywhere. Tallest feed footprint. Matches what your phone already shot.
2. 1080 × 1350 (4:5) — nearly as tall, still what most scheduling tools default to, minor side trim in the grid.
3. 1080 × 1080 (1:1) — fine if your composition has breathing room, but you are giving up feed height and accepting a grid crop.
4. 1.91:1 landscape — only when the image genuinely needs the width. It occupies the least screen space of any format and looks worst on the profile.

If you have a back catalogue shot at 4:5 or 1:1, there is no reason to redo it. Change the ratio going forward and let the grid fill in.

Stories and Reels: Same Canvas, Different Danger Zones

Both are 1080 × 1920 at 9:16. The dimensions are the easy part; the interface is what ruins layouts.

Stories put your username and profile picture across the top and a reply field with the share and menu icons across the bottom. Leave roughly 250 pixels clear at the top and 340 at the bottom. That leaves about 1,330 pixels of genuinely safe vertical space in the middle.

Reels are worse, because the overlay is asymmetric. The caption, audio title and progress bar sit along the bottom, and the like, comment, share and menu buttons stack up the right-hand side. A working margin is about 108 px top, 320 px bottom, 60 px left and 120 px right. Anything critical — a price, a URL, a call to action — belongs in the upper-middle of the frame, not the lower third where instinct puts it.

There is a second crop to plan for: Reels also appear as a thumbnail in your profile grid, which shows the middle portion of the vertical frame. If your Reel's title card is at the very top of the video, the grid will show a headless subject and no text.

A quick way to check: build the graphic at 1080 × 1920, then draw a 1080 × 1080 box centred on it. If everything that must be readable sits inside that box, it survives every placement Instagram will put it through.

Getting There Without Losing Quality

Most "Instagram ruined my image" complaints are a resize problem, not a compression problem.

Instagram displays feed images at a maximum of 1080 pixels wide and downscales anything bigger during upload. That downscale happens on Instagram's servers with settings you do not control, and it is followed by re-compression. Hand it a 4032-pixel phone photo and you get its resampling and its encoder. Hand it a clean 1080-wide export and there is nothing left to resize, so the only step is a light re-encode.

The order matters:

1. Crop to the target ratio first — 3:4, 4:5, 1:1 or 9:16 — so you decide what leaves the frame rather than Instagram deciding.
2. Resize the longest edge so the width lands at exactly 1080 pixels.
3. Export as JPEG at quality 85–90, in sRGB. Not Adobe RGB; wide-gamut files come back looking washed out on some devices.
4. Check the file size. A few megabytes is fine. A 15 MB export invites more aggressive compression on the way in.

You can do the first two steps in the browser with our image resizer and crop tool, both of which have presets for the common social ratios, and trim the file with the compressor if it is heavier than it needs to be. Everything runs on your device — the photo never leaves your machine, which is the point of building these tools the way our parent company NoCubical builds them.

On format: JPEG for photographs, PNG for graphics with flat colour, sharp edges or text, where JPEG's blocking shows up around lettering. Instagram accepts both and re-encodes both. If you want the reasoning behind that split, we covered it in our format comparison. WebP is not a useful upload format here regardless of its size advantage.

Hitting a hard kilobyte ceiling is a different exercise from hitting a pixel target, and if that is what you are up against, our guide to file-size limits walks through it.

When Resizing Is the Wrong Fix

Some problems don't have a pixel solution, and it is worth knowing which:

• The photo is smaller than 1080 pixels wide. Enlarging a 640-pixel image to 1080 invents detail that was never captured, and Instagram's compression finds the soft edges immediately. Reshoot or crop tighter and accept the smaller frame.
• The composition is landscape and the placement is vertical. Cropping a wide group shot to 9:16 removes half the people in it. Put it on a background canvas at 1080 × 1920 instead, or post it as a landscape feed image and skip the Story.
• Text is unreadable at thumbnail size. No resize fixes 11-point body copy shown at 110 pixels. Fewer words, bigger.
• Colours shift after upload. That is a colour profile issue, not a size issue. Convert to sRGB before exporting.
• You are fighting the grid crop on every post. Switch to 3:4 and the problem stops existing.

The honest summary: resizing gets you the right shape at the right resolution, which is most of the battle. It cannot add information that was not in the original file, and it cannot rescue a composition that was framed for a different aspect ratio. Decide the ratio before you shoot, and the export is a thirty-second job.

Frequently Asked Questions