Instagram Portrait Size

The tallest shape the feed will show whole

1080 by 1350 pixels, a 4:5 portrait. Instagram will not display anything taller in the feed — go past 4:5 and the top and bottom are cropped away — so this is the maximum amount of somebody's screen a single post can occupy.

That is the whole argument for it, and it is a real one. A square post and a 4:5 post carry the same picture, but the portrait one fills about a quarter more of a phone as somebody scrolls past, and a quarter more time on screen is a quarter more chance of being looked at.

The cost is that your profile grid crops it. The grid uses its own shape, which is not the feed's, and Instagram has changed that shape before — so the durable rule is not a number, it is to keep the subject centred and to look at your own profile after posting.

Design for two crops at once

This is the whole skill. The feed sees 4:5; the grid sees something shorter cut from the middle of it.

So treat the middle square as the part that must work on its own, and the strips above and below it as room to breathe — sky, table, background, the bottom of a jacket. Put a face or a headline near the top edge and it will look composed in the feed and decapitated on your profile.

Why not go taller anyway

Because it is cropped rather than shrunk. A 9:16 image posted to the feed is not shown small — it has its top and bottom removed, and you do not choose which. Whatever was up there is gone for everybody who does not tap through, which is most people.

If you want the whole of a tall image seen, it belongs in a story or a reel, where 9:16 is the native shape.

1080 wide, not more

Instagram resizes everything to 1080 pixels wide on the way in. Sending 2160 does not produce a sharper post; it produces the same 1080 after a compression pass you did not control. Handing over exactly 1080 by 1350 means the only resize is the one you did and could see.

Keep text off the edges

Rounded corners in the feed, a different crop on the grid, and a caption bar under the image in some placements. A margin of about five per cent all round survives every one of them, and costs nothing.

Cover or Contain, and what each throws away

Two ways to fit one shape into another, and the tool offers both.

Cover fills the frame completely and crops whatever does not fit. Nothing is distorted and nothing is padded; some of the picture is simply gone. This is what you want almost always.

Contain fits the whole image inside the frame and fills the leftover space with a colour you choose. Nothing is lost, but the picture is smaller and there are bars. Right when the whole frame matters — a poster, a diagram, a design you cannot cut.

Neither ever stretches. An image squashed to fit is the one mistake that cannot be undone by looking at it again later.

Nothing is uploaded

The resizing happens in your browser using your own processor, so the image never leaves your machine. That is why there is no file-size limit, no queue and no account, and why a batch of forty is limited by your computer rather than by somebody’s free tier.