Instagram profile picture size

Instagram’s Help Center article on adding or changing a profile picture gives no size, and we found no other Meta page that does, so the figures you will find come from third-party guides. They agree on the circle and roughly agree on the numbers: the picture is displayed at about 110 × 110 pixels, and an upload of 320 × 320 is the size most of them recommend.

We recommend 320 × 320 over 110 × 110. Phone screens draw each point of the layout with two or three physical pixels, so a 110-pixel file has no detail to spare and can look soft, while 320 matches the stored copy Hootsuite describes. A bigger square, such as a 1080 × 1080 crop of a photo, works as well; it is scaled down.

• At the top of your profile, the largest version people see in the app.
• In the Stories tray at the top of the feed, with a coloured ring when there is a new Story to watch; the ring is green for a Close Friends Story.
• At the top of each of your posts in the feed, and beside every comment you leave.
• In the DM inbox, in chat headers, and in lists of likes, followers and suggested accounts.

Most people meet your picture in those small places, not on your profile. A design that only works at full size becomes a smudge beside a comment, so judge it at its smallest.

The circle shows about 79% of the square and drops the corners. The largest square that sits wholly inside it covers the central 70% of the width and height, and that is the area to keep anything important in.

• Faces: crop from the upper chest to just above the hair, with the eyes slightly above the centre. The circle then trims only the shoulders.
• Backgrounds: plain or softly blurred. At small sizes a busy background competes with your face.
• Logos: use the icon or monogram rather than a long wordmark. Your username already appears next to the picture in most places.
• Padding: a mark that touches the edges of the square loses its corners, so leave space around it.
• Colour: give a logo a solid background instead of transparency, so you choose what sits behind it.

Tip: Before uploading, shrink your design on screen to roughly the size of a fingernail. If it is still recognisable, it will hold up beside comments and in the inbox.

1. Crop to a square first, at 320 × 320 pixels or larger, so the app has nothing left to cut.
2. Export photos as high-quality JPGs and flat logos as PNGs.
3. Use the original photo, not a screenshot of an old profile picture, which carries every earlier round of compression.
4. In the app, change the picture from Edit profile, then check the circle preview before saving.
5. Avoid zooming far in during that step: the more you enlarge, the fewer of the photo’s pixels end up in the circle.

Blur almost always comes from too few pixels reaching the circle. The usual causes are a small source image, a heavy zoom when positioning the circle, a screenshot of a screenshot, or a dim phone photo whose grain gets worse each time it is compressed. A logo with hairline strokes can also break up at small sizes even when the file is sharp.

The fix is the same each time: start from the largest original you have, crop it to a square of at least 320 pixels before uploading, and simplify a logo until it reads at thumbnail size.