Instagram square post size

For almost five years, Instagram was square only. In August 2015 it added portrait and landscape posts, but the profile grid kept its square tiles for almost another decade, so a square post always fitted its tile exactly. That ended in early 2025, when Instagram moved the grid to 3:4 rectangles, saying that most photos and videos people upload are now vertical.

Instagram’s help centre now accepts any feed shape from 1.91:1, a wide landscape, to 3:4, a tall portrait. A square falls between the two, so the feed always shows it whole. What it gives up is height: at the 1,080-pixel width Instagram keeps, a square is 1,080 pixels tall, against 1,350 for a 4:5 portrait and 1,440 for a 3:4 one.

A grid tile is taller than it is wide; a square is not. To fill the tile, Instagram keeps the full height of a square post and trims its sides, so the tile shows the middle 810 × 1080 pixels. The outer 135 pixels on each side, an eighth of the width apiece, still appear in the feed but not on your profile.

• Lettering set across the full width loses its first and last characters on the grid.
• Before-and-after pictures placed side by side each lose their outer edge.
• A 2 × 2 collage loses a quarter of the width of every panel, all of it on the outer side.
• A product shot in the centre of a plain background loses nothing that matters.

Third-party guides describe the tile in different ways. Sprout Social and Hootsuite both give the grid view as 1012 × 1350 pixels, a 3:4 shape, and Hootsuite lists that figure beside its square post. Whatever size the tile is drawn at, the share a square loses stays the same: only the middle three-quarters of its width is shown.

Tip: Want a square image to appear whole on your profile? Place it on a 1080 × 1440 canvas with a 180-pixel band of colour above and below. The post becomes a 3:4 portrait that fills its tile, and the feed shows your square with a border.

Portrait posts take more of the screen, so they suit people, outfits, food and anything meant to stop a scroll. Square makes sense when the subject is compact or the layout is built around a centre point.

• Product photos on plain backgrounds, where a shop wants every item framed the same way.
• Logos, badges and announcement cards designed from the middle outwards.
• Flat lays shot from directly above, which are often composed as squares.
• Images you will reuse in places that ask for a square, such as some ad placements and marketplaces.
• A numbered series of posts that should all share one shape.

If attention in the feed matters most, go portrait. If a tidy profile matters most, remember that 3:4 posts now fill their tiles while squares are trimmed, so square is no longer the shape that keeps a grid neat.

Most photos aren’t square to begin with, so a square post starts with either a crop or a border. Doing it yourself, rather than leaving it to Instagram’s editor, lets you choose exactly what goes.

One quirk follows from the grid. A 3:4 photo fitted into a square has side bands 135 pixels wide, the very strips the grid trims, so on your profile it looks like an uncropped portrait. Posting the 3:4 photo as it is gives the same tile at a higher resolution, so the border only makes sense when every post in a series has to be square.

• Cropping a square out of a small image. A 1080 × 720 landscape cropped to a square gives 720 × 720, which Instagram keeps at that width, so it looks soft across a phone screen.
• Re-posting a square saved from Instagram or a chat app. Those copies are already compressed, and a new upload compresses them again.
• Setting a quote or a price across the full width, then finding the first and last words missing from the grid.
• Adding a thin white frame around a square photo. On the grid the side borders vanish while the top and bottom ones stay, so the tile looks lopsided.
• Exporting graphics in a wide colour space such as Display P3. Meta’s API converts other colour spaces to sRGB, and strong colours can shift on the way.

1. Set the canvas to 1080 × 1080 before designing, so nothing is squeezed into shape at the end.
2. Add guides 135 pixels in from the left and right, and keep lettering a little inside them, around 175 pixels from each edge.
3. Save photos as JPEG in sRGB. Meta’s API takes JPEG only, at up to 8 MB.
4. Stay between 1,080 and 1,440 pixels wide. Instagram stores feed photos at up to 1,080, and Meta’s API lists 1,440 as its maximum width.
5. After posting, open your profile and look at the tile as well as the post.