Instagram highlight cover size

A highlight is a set of your Stories saved under your bio, and its cover is the circle people tap to open it. Meta recommends a 9:16 shape for Stories, which the main guides put at 1080 × 1920 pixels, but we found no size for the cover itself, and neither Sprout Social’s nor Hootsuite’s image size guide lists one. Cover templates and size sites settle on 1080 × 1920, the Story canvas, and a cover can also be picked straight from a Story already in the highlight.

The two canvases end up the same, because the profile only ever shows the circle. Choose 1080 × 1920 if you want one template for covers and Stories alike, or a square if the files will only ever be covers.

Unless you move or zoom the image while setting it, the cover is a circle as wide as the image, centred on it. On a 1080 × 1920 file the circle runs from 420 to 1,500 pixels down. The largest square that fits inside it is about 764 pixels a side, so an icon kept within that square never meets the rim.

Tip: Put a 1,080 px circle and a 764 px square on a guide layer in your template. Every new cover then lines up with the others, which matters more in a row of five circles than in one.

Hootsuite’s guide to highlight covers makes the key point: the circles are small, so don’t crowd them with text or complicated images. People take in a row of covers at a glance while deciding what to tap, so each one needs a single shape that is recognisable without reading.

• One simple icon per cover, about half the width of the circle: roughly 500 px on a 1,080 px canvas.
• Bold, even strokes, around 30 px or thicker on the canvas. Hairline icons that look elegant at full size break up when shrunk.
• Strong contrast between icon and background. Two similar mid-tones merge into one blob.
• No words in the circle unless the word is the design. The highlight’s name already sits underneath.
• One background treatment for the whole row, such as a single colour or a family of brand colours. Sprout Social suggests pairing brand colours with icons or words.

Check the row in light and dark mode. The profile background is white in one and black in the other, so a white-backed cover becomes a bright disc on a dark screen, and a pale icon on a pale background can disappear altogether.

You can swap a cover whenever you like without touching the Stories inside the highlight. In the app:

1. Open your profile, tap the highlight, then tap More at the bottom right and choose Edit highlight. Pressing and holding the highlight on your profile offers the same option.
2. Tap Edit cover near the top of the screen.
3. Tap the photo icon near the bottom to pick an image from your camera roll, or choose one of the Stories already in the highlight.
4. Adjust the image until the icon sits in the middle of the circle, then tap Done and save the highlight.

Picking an image from your camera roll doesn’t share anything. Hootsuite’s guide confirms the cover can come straight from your camera roll, so there is no need to post it as a Story first and delete it afterwards.

On a business profile, highlights are the part that doesn’t scroll away. A new visitor can jump straight to prices or reviews without digging through posts, so plan the row as a menu and give each item an icon that says what is inside.

If you run comment keyword offers, a highlight that explains them, such as “Comment GUIDE on any reel for the checklist”, keeps the instructions in front of new visitors long after the original Story has expired.

• Icons that reach the rim of the circle and lose their tips.
• Mixed styles: a photo on one cover, a line icon on the next and a word on the third.
• Covers in slightly different shades of the brand colour, because each was exported from a different app.
• Flat icons saved as low-quality JPGs, which leaves smudges around the edges; PNG keeps them clean.
• Thin, pale icons that vanish once the circle is shrunk.
• Restyling one cover and forgetting the rest, so the row stops looking like a set.