Instagram portrait size

Instagram’s help centre supports any shape from 1.91:1 to 3:4, which at 1,080 pixels wide puts the tallest portrait at 1,440 pixels. Third-party guides such as Sprout Social’s and Hootsuite’s still give 1080 × 1350 (4:5) as the portrait size, and Hootsuite lists 4:5 as the feed limit. Both are true portraits that the feed shows in full; they differ in height and in where they can be published.

If you want a single size for everything, pick 4:5. Choosing 3:4 buys 90 more pixels of height, a post about 7% taller, at the cost of one more rule to remember.

Instagram crops any photo taller than 3:4 to fit, so the shape your camera saves decides how much is lost. Doing the crop yourself before posting lets you choose which part goes.

Most phone cameras save 3:4 photos when held upright, which is why 3:4 has become the natural portrait shape: a phone photo posts whole. The 2:3 shape comes from many dedicated cameras, and 9:16 from screenshots and the full-screen camera setting.

Tip: Cropping a 2:3 camera photo to 3:4? Take the spare height from whichever end has less going on, often sky or floor, instead of leaving the crop to the app.

Since 2025 the profile grid has shown each post as a 3:4 tile. A 3:4 portrait fills its tile completely. A 4:5 portrait loses about 34 pixels from each side on the grid, around 3% of the width per side, though the feed still shows all of it.

• On a 4:5 design, keep text at least 40 pixels in from the left and right edges so the grid tile doesn’t clip it.
• Leave the top-right corner plain. The grid draws small icons there for carousels, pinned posts and Reels.
• Size headlines for the grid, where three posts share the width of a phone screen.
• Make every slide of a portrait carousel the same size, so the app has no reason to crop one to match the rest.

Tools that publish for you go through Meta’s Content Publishing API, which takes images whose shape falls between 4:5 and 1.91:1. A 3:4 file is outside that range, so the API turns it down, and a scheduling tool will either show an error or crop the image to 4:5 first. Exporting at 1080 × 1350 avoids both.

The API’s other rules are easy to meet at export: JPEG only, 8 MB at most, and sRGB colour. It keeps widths from 320 to 1,440 pixels and rescales anything outside that range. Files in another colour space are converted to sRGB, which can shift the most saturated colours. Since 1,440 pixels is within the width range, a 1440 × 1800 JPEG made for a Facebook feed ad can go to a scheduler unchanged, as long as it stays under 8 MB.

• Cutting a portrait out of a small landscape image. A 1080 × 720 screenshot yields a 3:4 portrait just 540 pixels wide, and Instagram keeps that width instead of adding detail, so it looks soft across a phone screen.
• Designing at Story size, 1080 × 1920, and posting it to the feed, where the top and bottom are cut to reach 3:4 or 4:5.
• Sending a 3:4 export to a scheduler, then finding the post trimmed or rejected.
• Saving lettering-heavy graphics as low-quality JPEGs, which leaves blotchy edges around text. Export at high quality, or as PNG when posting from the app.
• Exporting in a wide colour profile from a photo editor and letting the conversion to sRGB happen later, out of your sight.