Instagram post size: the range Instagram actually keeps

Search for an Instagram post size and you get a number. 1080 x 1350. Every chart says it, none of them says where it came from, and about a third of them are quietly out of date.

The number is real, but it is a choice inside a rule, and the rule is published. Instagram documents exactly what it accepts and exactly what it does to a file that falls outside. Once you have read the rule, you stop looking sizes up: you can work out any dimension you need, and you can tell whether the file already on your desktop is going to survive the upload.

What size is an Instagram post?

1080 pixels wide, at any height between 566 and 1440 pixels.

That is the whole answer, and it is a range rather than a size because Instagram publishes it as one. Instagram's own documentation says it uploads a photo at the best resolution possible, up to a width of 1080 pixels, and that a photo with a width between 320 and 1080 pixels keeps its original resolution as long as the aspect ratio sits between 1.91:1 and 3:4. At 1080 wide, those two ratios are a height of 566 and a height of 1440.

Four things follow from that one paragraph, and they answer most of the questions people actually have:

1. 1080 pixels wide is the ceiling. Anything wider is sized down for you.
2. 320 pixels wide is the floor. Anything narrower is enlarged, which is how a post ends up soft.
3. 1.91:1 to 3:4 is the shape range. Anything outside it is cropped on upload. You can drag to reposition the frame, but you cannot keep the whole image.
4. Inside those bounds, nothing happens to your file. It goes up as you made it.

What is the best size for an Instagram post?

1080 x 1350 pixels, which is 4:5. Use it as the default and you will almost never be wrong.

It is not the tallest option, and that is the point. It fills far more of a phone screen than a square does, it sits comfortably inside the supported range rather than at the edge of it, and it survives being shown at a smaller preview shape better than the extreme does. It is the safe middle.

The tallest option is 1080 x 1440, which is 3:4. This is the half of the rule most size charts still miss: they stop at 1350 and leave 90 pixels of height on the table. Reach for 1440 when the image is the whole point and you want every pixel of screen you can get. Reach for 1350 when there is a headline in the frame that a preview crop must not touch.

Here is the full range, all at the 1080 ceiling:

Will Instagram keep my file, or crop it?

That depends on your file, so here is a checker rather than another chart. Drop the image you are about to post into it and it tells you which of the four outcomes above applies, what a crop would cost you, and the nearest size Instagram will keep. If the file would be cropped, it draws the cut on your own image so you can see what goes. Nothing is uploaded: the dimensions are read off the decoded file in your browser.

The order it checks in is worth knowing, because it is the order Instagram works in. Ratio comes first. A 4000 pixel wide panorama is a crop problem, not a resolution problem, and exporting it smaller does not save it.

Does a bigger export mean better quality?

No, and this is the most expensive myth in the whole topic. Instagram sizes anything above 1080 pixels wide down to 1080. Exporting at 4000 does not give the platform more to work with, it just moves the resampling from your design tool, where you can see the result and adjust, to a compressor you have no access to.

A photo straight off an iPhone is 4032 x 3024. Divide those and you get 1.33, comfortably inside the range, so nothing gets cropped. But it is nearly four times the ceiling. Export it yourself at 1080 x 810 and you keep control of how it gets there.

What happens if the ratio is wrong?

Instagram crops it to fit a supported ratio. It centres the crop by default and lets you drag to reposition it, which means you choose which part survives, not whether a part is lost.

The common version of this mistake is a story-shaped file posted to the feed. A 1080 x 1920 export is 9:16, well past the 3:4 ceiling, so the feed keeps 1440 pixels of the 1920 and drops the rest. That is a quarter of the image gone, usually including whatever you put at the top or the bottom.

The other direction is rarer and more brutal. A 3000 x 1000 panorama is 3:1, far wider than 1.91:1, and loses about 36% of its width on upload.

What is the Instagram carousel size?

The same as a single photo, with one extra rule that catches almost everyone.

Instagram's documentation on multi-photo posts says you can share up to 20 photos and videos as a single post, and that the orientation you choose, square, portrait or landscape, applies to all of the photos and videos in the post. You cannot select a different orientation for each one.

So the Instagram carousel dimensions are decided once, for the whole set, before any design happens. Pick 1080 x 1350, build every slide on that canvas, and export the set together. Drop a square slide into a portrait carousel and it gets cropped to match, usually through something you needed. The set also takes one caption and one location for the whole thing, though you can tag different people in each individual photo.

What size should a story or a reel be?

1080 x 1920, which is 9:16 and full screen.

Video runs on its own numbers, published separately. Instagram accepts a reel with an aspect ratio anywhere between 1.91:1 and 9:16, at a minimum of 30 frames per second and a minimum resolution of 720 pixels. The recommended reel cover is 420 x 654 pixels, or about 1:1.55.

The cover is the one setting on this page you cannot fix afterwards. Instagram states plainly that you cannot edit a cover photo after it has been uploaded, so it belongs in the export checklist rather than in the thirty seconds before you hit share.

Are Instagram post sizes and Instagram ad sizes the same?

No, and mixing them up is a common source of confusion inside a team.

Everything above is organic posting, where 1080 wide is the ceiling. Paid creative goes through Meta's ad pipeline instead, and the specs there ask for larger files: the Meta ads guide recommends 1440 x 1800 for a 4:5 Facebook feed image, which we covered in the ad creative design guide. Both figures are correct. They describe different systems. If your designer is exporting ad-sized masters for the organic grid and wondering why nothing looks sharper, this is why.

What is the Instagram post size in inches?

It depends entirely on the resolution you print at, which is exactly why pixels are the unit that matters here.

1080 pixels is 15 inches at 72 pixels per inch, and 3.6 inches at 300 pixels per inch. Same file, two answers, both correct. Instagram is a screen format with no fixed physical size, so design in pixels. Convert to inches only when the same artwork is also going to print, and then start from the print size and work back, because a 1080 pixel file is not enough for anything larger than a postcard at print resolution.

How do I stop a good image being ruined at upload?

Five habits, in the order you hit them.

1. Set the canvas before you design, not after. Start the file at 1080 x 1350 and work inside it. Designing at some other size and exporting to 1350 crops the artwork rather than the empty space you meant to leave.
2. Export at exactly 1080 wide. Not 2160, not 4000, for the reason above.
3. Keep the important part away from the edges. Your post appears at more than one shape: full size in the feed, smaller in a profile preview, smaller again in search. Text and faces near an edge are the first casualties of any preview crop.
4. Check the ratio, not the pixel count. A 1080 x 1600 export looks perfectly fine in your folder and arrives cropped, because 1600 is taller than the 1440 ceiling.
5. Post one test image before you batch a month of them. Two minutes here catches a template that crops badly, which is otherwise a mistake you make thirty times before you notice.

Where does the crop actually fall?

On whatever is nearest the edge. Which makes the composition decision simple.

That layout survives any crop it meets, because everything load-bearing sits in the middle third. Compare it with a post that puts its headline hard against the top edge:

Top-anchored type is the right call for a feed post, where the reader sees the whole frame, and the riskiest call for anything that might be previewed shorter. And a headline pinned to a side edge is the one to avoid outright:

A note on those three examples: they are all square, because they come from a licensed set of static post layouts. In practice you would build the same composition on a 1080 x 1350 canvas. The lesson is where the type sits relative to the edges, and that does not change with the ratio.

How Selzee handles the part that is not the size

Getting to 1080 x 1350 takes one export setting, and it is worth getting right, because a cropped headline wastes the whole post. It is still the easy half.

The hard half is having something worth putting in the frame every week. That is where most small teams actually stall: the template is ready, the canvas is the right shape, and nobody knows what this week's post should say.

Selzee is your AI content team, and that is the part it works on. It reads your reviews, your comments and the results of the posts you have already published, finds the questions and objections that keep coming back, and turns them into concepts and briefs for what to make next. Then it reads the results back, so the following set is chosen on evidence rather than on whose turn it is to suggest something.

It does not post for you, and it does not invent an insight your customers never gave it. It reads the evidence, proposes what to make, and learns from what shipped.

If you want the ideas themselves rather than the pipeline, our Instagram post ideas guide has thirty of them sorted by the action each one is built to earn, and it embeds a calculator for checking whether the last one worked.

FAQ

What size is an Instagram post in 2026?

1080 pixels wide, at a height between 566 and 1440 pixels. The size of Instagram posts is published as a range rather than as one number, and 1080 x 1350 is the default to use inside it. The specification itself is a range rather than a single size, and the range has not changed: what changed is that most published charts stop at 1350 and never mention the 1440 ceiling.

What is the maximum Instagram post size?

1080 x 1440 pixels, which is 3:4, the tallest ratio Instagram keeps without cropping. In width, 1080 pixels is the maximum that is preserved: a wider file is sized down to 1080 on upload.

Is 1080 x 1080 still a good size?

It is still supported and still kept, so nothing breaks. It just uses less of the screen than 1080 x 1350 does on the way past, which matters more than the shape does. Square is the right choice when the composition needs it, not as a default.

What is the Instagram grid size?

The grid shows a cropped preview of each post rather than the post itself, so there is no separate export size for it. Design so the subject sits away from the edges and the same file works in both places. This is the practical reason to prefer 1350 over 1440 when there is type in the frame.

Why does my post look blurry?

Almost always one of two things. Either the file went up under 320 pixels wide and was enlarged, or it went up far above 1080 and was sized down by the platform's compressor rather than by you. Export at exactly 1080 wide and both causes disappear.

Can I change the size of a post after publishing?

No. Neither the crop nor the dimensions can be edited after a post is shared, and a reel cover cannot be changed at all once uploaded. This is why the two-minute test post is worth the two minutes.

The short version

Instagram keeps a photo between 320 and 1080 pixels wide at any ratio from 1.91:1 to 3:4. Export at 1080 x 1350 and you are inside that range with room to spare. Export at 1080 x 1440 when you want the maximum height. Everything else on this page is a consequence of those two sentences, and the checker above will apply them to your own file faster than you can look up a chart.

The post layouts above come from the creative ad design dataset by Contralabs, used under CC BY 4.0. Photographs by Swello and Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash.

Set your template to 1080 x 1350 once and the sizing question is closed for good. If the harder half is what goes in the frame each week, see Selzee run on your own account: it reads your reviews and comments and comes back with what to make next.