Make Instagram highlight covers that match

Highlight covers show on your profile as a small circle taken from the middle of the image. Meta publishes no size for them. We checked Meta’s developer documentation on 7 October 2026: it recommends a 9:16 shape for Story images, but says nothing about highlight covers. So 1080 × 1920, the size of a Story, is common practice rather than a rule, and the circle in this tool is a guide you can edit.

By default the guide is a circle as wide as the image, centred on it. On a 1080 × 1920 file that is a 1080 px circle running from 420 to 1500 px down, and the largest square inside it is about 764 px a side. The dashed square on the preview marks that square. Keep the icon inside it and the rim cannot clip it. If your profile crops tighter, lower the circle width slider and the preview follows.

Our guide to highlight cover sizes lists the same numbers with the sources we found for each.

• Use one background treatment across the row. A single colour, or one gradient, looks deliberate; five different photos look accidental.
• Keep the icon about half the width of the circle. Roughly 400 to 550 px on the 1080 px canvas is a rule of thumb, not a Meta figure.
• Choose a heavier line weight than feels necessary. Thin icons look elegant at full size and disappear when the circle is small.
• Check the Dark mode button on the preview. A pale icon on a pale cover can vanish against a white profile, and a white cover glows on a dark one.
• Leave words off the cover. The highlight’s name already sits under the circle, so the cover only needs one clear shape.

Tip: Plan the row as a menu. For a café that might be Menu, Order, Hours and Reviews, each with its own icon from the cake, bag, clock and star shapes.

Save the cover to your phone’s photos, open the highlight on your profile, tap Edit highlight, then Edit cover, and choose the image from your camera roll. You do not have to post it as a Story first. If you made the cover on a computer, send the file to your phone with AirDrop, a message to yourself or a cloud folder.

Choose PNG for flat icons and letters, because it keeps their edges crisp. Choose JPEG for covers made from photos, where the file is smaller and the difference is invisible at circle size.

Emoji are drawn with your device’s own emoji font. An emoji made on an iPhone will look like Apple’s version in the file, and one made on Windows will look like Microsoft’s. Once saved, the picture does not change with whoever views it.