Instagram Reel cover size

Meta gives two figures that point different ways. Instagram’s help centre suggests a cover of 420 × 654 pixels, a 1:1.55 shape. Meta’s documentation for tools that publish Reels recommends 9:16 instead, and says that when a cover isn’t 9:16 it crops the image and uses the middle-most 9:16 rectangle. Sprout Social’s guide plans the cover at 1080 × 1920.

We recommend 1080 × 1920. It is the shape Meta’s documentation asks for, it has enough pixels to stay sharp on a modern phone, and it matches a frame of the video, so a designed cover and a still from the clip are interchangeable. A 420 × 654 file still works in the app, but sent through a scheduling tool it would be trimmed to about 368 × 654, losing 26 pixels from each side.

Stack the three shapes on top of each other, centred, and the grid’s 3:4 is the shortest. Whatever sits inside the middle 1080 × 1440 shows in every version, which is why that band is where the title belongs.

Every Reel appears on your profile as a 3:4 tile, so a 9:16 cover loses an eighth of its height at the top and another eighth at the bottom: 240 pixels each on a 1080 × 1920 file. Talking-head covers are the classic casualty. With the title in the top band, the grid shows the speaker’s face and none of the words.

When you set the cover in the app, you can also adjust the crop used for the grid by dragging the image or pinching to zoom. Use it to centre the title in the tile instead of trusting the default.

• Three tiles share the width of a phone screen, so each cover is shown at about a third of the screen’s width.
• Small icons and view counts can sit in the corners of tiles, so keep the corners free of detail.
• Covers sit beside your photo posts, which now use the same 3:4 tile, so a cover in your usual colours keeps the grid looking like one account.

On a phone about 390 points wide, a common size, a grid tile is roughly 130 points across. A 1,080-pixel-wide cover is shrunk to about an eighth of its width to fit, so lettering 100 pixels tall in the file appears around 12 points tall, the size of small print.

• Make the title at least 150 pixels tall in the file, which comes out near 18 points in the tile.
• Keep it to two to five words; a full sentence turns into texture at that size.
• Choose a heavy weight with strong contrast. Thin script fonts break up when shrunk.
• Crop faces close. A person in a wide shot becomes a few pixels in the tile.

Tip: Build one cover template with a fixed title position, font and colour inside the 1080 × 1440 band. Each new Reel then needs only a new image and new words, and your covers line up as a set.

In the app you can choose a frame from the Reel as its cover, or add an image from your camera roll. Tools that publish through Meta’s API have the same two routes: a frame picked by its position in the video, in milliseconds, or an image file. If a tool sends both, Meta’s documentation says it uses the image and ignores the frame.

• A frame is quick and shows exactly what the video contains, but frames grabbed mid-movement are often soft.
• A designed image takes a few minutes longer and gives you control of the title, the face and the colours.
• A middle route: export a sharp still from the edit, then add the title in a design app.

Through the API, a cover image must be a JPEG of no more than 8 MB. That route is also the reason not to design covers at the grid’s 3:4: the API would cut a 1080 × 1440 image down to its middle 810 × 1440 to make it 9:16, the grid would then crop that again, and your profile would show only the middle 810 × 1080 of the design.

1. Open a 1080 × 1920 canvas and add guides 240 pixels from the top and from the bottom.
2. Place the title and the main face between those guides, clear of the corners.
3. Export a JPEG in sRGB. A 1080 × 1920 still is normally far below the 8 MB that Meta’s API allows.
4. In the app, set the image as the cover, then check the grid crop before sharing.
5. Once the Reel is live, look at your profile: the tile is how the Reel appears to anyone browsing it.