How to Adjust Instagram Picture Size

Ever spend ages composing the perfect photo, only to have Instagram awkwardly crop someone's head or a key detail when you post it? It’s a common, frustrating problem, but it’s entirely fixable. This guide provides a complete walkthrough of Instagram’s picture sizes and step-by-step instructions for adjusting your images so they look exactly how you want them to, every single time.

Why Does Instagram Image Size Actually Matter?

You might be wondering if it's worth the effort to resize your photos. The answer is a resounding yes. Getting your image dimensions right isn’t just about aesthetics, it has a direct impact on your content's performance and how professionally your brand or profile is perceived.

• You Control the Narrative: When you upload a photo in a non-standard size, you're letting Instagram's cropping algorithm make creative decisions for you. Pre-sizing your image puts you back in control of the composition, making sure your audience sees exactly what you intended.
• Maximize "Screen Real Estate": The most valuable commodity on social media is screen space. Portrait-style images (4:5 ratio) take up more of the user's vertical phone screen than square or landscape photos. This makes them more noticeable, more engaging, and generally better for grabbing attention as people scroll.
• Maintain Image Quality: When Instagram has to heavily compress or enlarge your photo to fit its feed, you often lose quality. The image can appear blurry, pixelated, or soft. Uploading a photo with the correct dimensions (especially the right width) helps preserve the sharpness and clarity of your original shot.
• Cultivate a Professional Look: A grid full of beautifully composed, uncropped images looks polished and intentional. It shows your followers you care about the details and helps build a stronger, more cohesive brand aesthetic. Inconsistent cropping can make a feed look messy and unplanned.

The Ultimate Instagram Image Size Cheat Sheet

Instagram supports a variety of post formats, and each has its own optimal dimensions. While you don’t need to memorize every single number, keeping this guide handy will save you a lot of guesswork. The ideal width for feed posts is 1080 pixels - sticking to that width minimizes Instagram's compression and keeps your images looking crisp.

Feed Posts (Square, Portrait, and Landscape)

These are the photos and videos that appear on your main profile grid and in your followers' feeds.

• Portrait (4:5): 1080px wide by 1350px tall
  This is the holy grail for feed posts. It offers the most vertical screen space, making your content stand out. If your goal is to maximize engagement, you should be defaulting to a 4:5 aspect ratio whenever possible. It's the most immersive format for a single-image post in the feed.
• Square (1:1): 1080px wide by 1080px tall
  The classic Instagram format. It’s a safe, reliable option that’s easy to compose for. Square posts are great for symmetrical shots, headshots, or simple graphics. While they don't take up as much screen space as a portrait photo, they offer a timeless and tidy look on your grid.
• Landscape (1.91:1): 1080px wide by 566px tall
  This format is the least common for a reason - it takes up the least amount of vertical space in the feed and is easy for users to scroll past. However, it's necessary for certain wide-angle shots, like group photos or sprawling landscape photography where a horizontal composition is essential to the story.

Instagram Stories and Reels

Both Stories and Reels are designed for full-screen, vertical viewing and therefore share the same dimensions.

• Stories & Reels (9:16): 1080px wide by 1920px tall
  This is the standard smartphone screen dimension. To create an immersive experience, you should always design your content to fill the entire frame. Any photo or video that doesn't fit this 9:16 ratio will be displayed with distracting colored bars at the top and bottom. When designing graphics or editing videos for Stories or Reels, remember to leave some buffer space at the very top and bottom to avoid covering important elements with Instagram's interface (your profile icon, caption text, call-to-action buttons, etc.).

Other Important Sizes

• Profile Picture: Recommended 320px by 320px. While Instagram stores this at a higher resolution, it’s displayed as a circle, so make sure your primary subject is centered so it doesn't get clipped.
• Carousel Posts: Carousels can use any of the three feed post ratios (square, portrait, or landscape). The important thing is that all images and videos in a single carousel must have the same aspect ratio. You can't mix a portrait photo with a square one in the same post.

How to Adjust Instagram Picture Size Without Cropping

Now that you know the right dimensions, how do you actually resize your photos? Here are three easy methods, from the quickest built-in option to using a free app for more control.

Method 1: Use Instagram's Built-in Crop Tool

Instagram has a very basic tool for minor adjustments when you upload an image. It's not a full-featured resizer, but it's great for quick fixes.

1. Open Instagram and tap the + icon to create a new post.
2. Select the photo you want to upload from your gallery.
3. By default, Instagram may show you a cropped, square version of your image. Look for the format icon (it looks like a rectangle with two arrows pointing outward) in the bottom left corner of the photo preview.
4. Tap this icon. It will toggle between the automatic square crop and a fuller version of your image. If your photo's original aspect ratio is between 1.91:1 and 4:5, this button will display it in the largest possible format without cutting anything off.

Limitations: This method only works if your image already fits within Instagram's supported aspect ratios. For example, a very tall and skinny screenshot or a super wide panorama photo will still be forced to crop. For those, you'll need another tool.

Method 2: Use a Free Mobile App (A Step-by-Step with Canva)

For complete control, a dedicated app is your best bet. Apps like Snapseed, Adobe Express, and Canva make it incredibly simple to create a perfectly-sized canvas for any Instagram format.

Here’s how to do it in Canva, one of the most popular and user-friendly options:

1. Open Canva and Create a Design: In the app, tap the + button at the bottom and choose "Custom size."
2. Enter the Right Dimensions: For a perfect portrait post, you'd type in a width of 1080 and a height of 1350. Then tap "Create new design." This creates a blank canvas with the exact 4:5 Instagram ratio. For a Story, you’d use 1080 x 1920.
3. Add Your Photo: Tap the + button again on the blank editor screen, go to your "Camera Roll," and select the picture you want to use.
4. Position Your Image: Your photo will appear on the canvas. You can drag it to reposition it and use two fingers to pinch and zoom to crop it perfectly within the 4:5 frame. Or you can zoom out slightly to fit the entire picture in (which may leave some whitespace at the top/bottom).
5. Download and Post: Once you’re happy with the framing, tap the "Share" icon in the top right corner, then hit "Download." Save it to your phone as a PNG or JPG, and it's now ready to be uploaded to Instagram with no risk of unwanted cropping.

Method 3: Fit a Whole Picture on Instagram by Adding Borders

So what if you want to post a full vertical photo (like one taken in standard smartphone orientation) or a horizontal photo without any cropping?

The solution is to add borders to it, turning the whole thing into a 4:5, 1:1, or other compliant aspect ratio. This is a popular technique that keeps your entire photo intact by placing it on a colored background (usually white, black, or a color-matched shade).

This sounds complicated, but it takes just a minute using the Canva method described above:

1. Create a custom canvas (e.g., 1080 x 1350 pixels for portrait).
2. While the canvas is still blank, select it and choose a background color from the color palette at the bottom (say, white).
3. Now add your horizontal photo to this vertical white canvas.
4. Instead of zooming in to fill the frame, simply shrink it down and center it. You will now have your complete horizontal image with white bars at the top and bottom.

This technique creates a finished image file that Instagram recognizes as a valid 4:5 ratio, so it won’t crop anything. This maintains the artistic integrity of your photograph while still looking great in the feed.

Final Thoughts

Nailing your Instagram image dimensions might seem technical, but it's one of the easiest ways to elevate your content. Sticking to a 4:5 aspect ratio for feed posts and 9:16 for Stories/Reels will help you occupy more screen real estate, maintain image quality, and build a more professional aesthetic. Once you know the key numbers, tools like Canva make the resizing process practically automatic.

Perfecting your content's dimensions is an awesome first step, but a strong social media presence is built on consistency. To really make an impact, you have to show up regularly with high-quality content. At Postbase, we built our visual planning calendar to give creators a bird's-eye view of their entire schedule. This makes it easy to plan out your perfectly-sized content weeks in advance, so you're never scrambling to get a post together at the last minute. And since it's built video-first, you can schedule your Reels & Stories just as seamlessly as your feed posts, without worrying about format issues.