How to Mix Landscape and Portrait in Instagram

Tired of having to crop that amazing landscape photo just to fit it into Instagram's portrait-friendly feed? You're not alone. The good news is you can absolutely mix landscape and portrait photos in your Instagram feed without awkward crops or compromising your vision. This tutorial will walk you through the simple techniques and third-party tools that give you full control over how your photos and videos appear, a must-know skill for any creator or brand looking to build a dynamic grid.

Why Mixing Orientations on Instagram is Worth It

You might be wondering if it's even worth the effort. For a long time, the dominant advice was to stick to a consistent format - either all square or all portrait - to create a clean, uniform grid. While that approach can work, mixing orientations opens up a ton of creative possibilities.

• Tell a Better Story: Some scenes demand a wide, landscape shot to capture their scale, while a portrait highlights the details of a subject. Using both allows you to use the best format for the story you're telling, rather than force-fitting everything into one box.
• Create Visual Rhythm: A feed with varied compositions is more interesting to scroll through. Alternating between portrait and landscape can break the monotony, making your profile more engaging and encouraging people to browse longer.
• Showcase All Your Best Work: Let's be real - not every great photo you take is going to fit a 4:5 ratio. Learning how to mix formats means you no longer have to leave your best landscape shots gathering dust in your camera roll. You can finally share them as they were meant to be seen.

The Basics: Understanding Instagram's Aspect Ratios

Before we get into the "how," it's helpful to understand the basic rules of the game. Instagram's main feed is surprisingly flexible and supports three primary aspect ratios for a single image or video post:

• Square (1:1): The classic Instagram format. It displays an image with equal width and height. It's safe, easy, and always looks good on the grid.
• Portrait (4:5): This is the tallest format allowed. Its dimensions are 4 units wide by 5 units tall (e.g., 1080px by 1350px). This is the "golden ratio" for Instagram because it takes up the most vertical space on a phone screen, grabbing more attention as people scroll.
• Landscape (1.91:1): The widest format you can use. It's great for sweeping vistas or group shots but also takes up the least amount of vertical space in the feed, making it less impactful than a portrait shot.

When you look at your profile grid, Instagram shows a square (1:1) preview of every post, regardless of its original orientation. This means your tall portrait and wide landscape shots will be center-cropped into a square for the grid view, but they'll appear in their full orientation once someone taps on them.

The Easiest Method: Creating a Mixed-Format Group Post (Carousel)

The single most powerful technique for mixing landscape and portrait images comes from a feature you already use: the multi-photo "carousel" post. While you can't post a single photo that contains both orientations, you absolutely can within a single carousel. Here's the trick: the orientation of the first photo or video you select sets the crop for the entire carousel.

If your first photo is a 4:5 portrait, every subsequent photo in that carousel, whether it was originally landscape or square, will be displayed inside that 4:5 frame. This is the secret to getting a cinematic landscape shot to appear in your feed without being cropped horribly.

Step-by-Step Guide to the Carousel Method

Let's walk through the process of combining a tall portrait shot with a wide landscape photo in one seamless post.

1. Choose Your "Hero" Image and Set the Format

Your first image is the most important, as it determines the aspect ratio for all the other slides. For maximum impact, it's almost always best to choose a portrait (4:5) format. This secures the most screen real estate.

Open Instagram, tap the '+' icon to create a new post, and select your first photo. Tap the small format icon (it looks like <, >,) in the bottom left corner of the image preview to switch it from the default square to its original portrait or landscape orientation. Make sure your first image is set to 4:5.

2. Add Padding to Your Non-Conforming Photos

This is where the magic happens. Let's say your second photo is a beautiful landscape. If you add it to your 4:5 portrait carousel right now, Instagram will force you to crop it, cutting off the top and bottom. To fix this, you need to add padding (or borders) to it beforehand.

You can do this with tons of free apps. Canva is a great option.

• Open Canva and create a new design with custom dimensions. Use 1080px width by 1350px height to get a perfect 4:5 ratio.
• Upload your landscape photo to the design.
• Position your landscape photo in the middle of the design. You'll have empty space above and below it. You can leave this space white, change it to black, or even use a blurred version of the image as a background.
• Download the finished image. You now have an portrait-oriented file that contains your landscape photo.

Repeat this process for any other landscape images you want to include in the carousel.

3. Build and Post Your Carousel

Now, go back to Instagram. Start your post over again.

• Select your 4:5 hero image first.
• Tap the "Select Multiple" icon (the layered squares).
• Now, select your newly saved "padded" landscape photos. Since they are technically 4:5 files now, Instagram won't force you to crop them.
• As you swipe through the preview, you'll see your portrait photo at full height, followed by your landscape photo letterboxed perfectly within the same frame.
• Add your caption, tags, and hit publish!

Just like that, you've mixed a portrait and a landscape photo in a single, polished post.

Advanced Ideas and Other Creative Approaches

Once you've mastered the basic padding technique, you can get even more creative with how you present different formats.

Create Seamless Panorama Carousels

You've likely seen those posts where you swipe, and a wide panoramic photo slides smoothly across the screen. This is a fantastic way to post a landscape shot in an engaging way. It breaks up one big landscape image into a series of square (1:1) slides.

While you can do this manually in an editor like Photoshop by slicing up your photo, several apps automate the process. Look for apps like "Panorama Crop" or "InGrids" in your app store. You simply upload your landscape photo, and the app will chop it into perfectly sized carousel slides for you to upload.

Use a Layout App for a Single Post Collage

If you don't want to use a carousel, you can combine multiple photos into one image file using a collage or layout app. Instagram's own "Layout" app is built for this, as are apps like Canva or PicCollage.

This method lets you place a small landscape photo and a small portrait photo side-by-side within a single square (1:1) or portrait (4:5) frame. It's a different aesthetic, more like a scrapbook or a mood board, and can be very effective for showing a collection of images that tell one cohesive story, like a recipe or a travel itinerary.

A Note on Video

These same rules apply to video! You can easily include a landscape video in a portrait-dominated carousel. Just like with photos, you'll want to drop your landscape video into a 1080px by 1350px editing timeline (you can do this in apps like InShot or CapCut), which will add the necessary padding above and below before you export. This ensures your cinematic video isn't awkwardly cropped when paired with portrait slides.

Make Sure It All Looks Cohesive

The final pillar of success is aesthetics. Just because your photos have different orientations doesn't mean they should feel disconnected. The key to a beautiful, professional-looking feed is cohesive editing.

• Use Consistent Filters or Presets: Make sure the color grading, brightness, and contrast follow a similar style across all photos in a post and across your entire grid.
• Think About Flow: Arrange your photos within a carousel in an order that makes sense. You might start with a portrait to introduce a subject and then swipe to a landscape to reveal their surroundings. Good storytelling will always tie disparate elements together.
• Balance Your Grid: As you plan your content, think about how the different formats will look next to each other on your main grid profile. Try not to cluster all your wide, letterboxed landscape posts in one area. Sprinkle them throughout to maintain a nice visual balance.

It takes a little bit of prep work, but once you get the hang of it, mixing orientations becomes a simple, powerful tool in your content creation toolkit. It frees you from the "one size fits all" box and lets you focus on creating the best content possible, whatever shape it takes.

Final Thoughts

Breaking free from a single aspect ratio gives your Instagram feed a ton of creative breathing room. By learning to use carousels strategically and prepping your landscape photos with a little padding, you can tell richer visual stories and never again have to leave a great shot behind just because of its shape.

Once you've mastered crafting these posts, planning them visually is the next challenge. We built the visual calendar in Postbase to solve this exact problem. It lets us see how all our content - the tall portraits, the padded landscapes, and the Reels - will look together on the grid before anything goes live. It makes it simple to drag and drop everything into place and curate a truly striking feed without the usual back and forth.