Instagram post size

Ask ten guides for the Instagram post size and ten of them answer 1080 × 1350. Ask Instagram, and you get something looser and more useful: a width, and a range of heights around it.

Everything quoted below was read from Instagram’s own help center and from Meta’s Ads Guide on September 7, 2026.

What Instagram publishes about post size

Read it as one sentence and the shape of the rule appears. Instagram does not want a single size. It wants a width of 1080 and a height anywhere from 566 to 1440. Inside that window your file survives with its proportions untouched. Outside it, something gets trimmed, and Instagram picks what.

Where 1080 × 1350 comes from

1080 × 1350 is 4:5, which sits comfortably inside the supported range and is the tallest shape that has been safe across every version of the feed for years. It is a good default. It is not a specification, and Instagram has never written it as one.

The genuinely tall option is 1080 × 1440, which is 3:4 — the exact ceiling quoted above. It takes up more vertical space in a scrolling feed than 4:5 does, and Instagram’s own sentence supports it. Guides rarely mention it, and the caution behind that silence is real: the taller you go, the more a future layout change can take from you, and 4:5 has more slack.

At the other end, 1080 × 566 is 1.91:1, the widest ratio Instagram will keep. It is a letterbox, and it is worth knowing about because it is the only landscape shape that survives intact.

Two Metas, two numbers

Meta’s Ads Guide, covering paid Instagram Feed placements, gives figures of its own:

So the ads guide asks for 1440 across while the organic help page caps at 1080. Both pages belong to Meta, both are current, and they disagree by a third.

Facebook’s side of the ads guide has moved the same way and further: its feed recommendation is now 4:5 as well, quoted along with the per-placement tables in Facebook ad size.

They are not actually in conflict, because they describe different things. The organic page describes what happens to your upload: it is resampled down to 1080 wide. The ads guide describes what to supply: more pixels than the surface will end up showing, so the downscale is Meta’s problem instead of yours. Both are advice to send something generous.

The practical version: build at 1080 wide and you match the organic ceiling exactly. Build at 1440 wide and you satisfy the ads guide and still land on 1080 for an organic post, having lost nothing you would have kept.

The ratio is what you cannot get back

Notice which figure carries the consequence. Getting the pixel count wrong costs you a resample — annoying, invisible to most eyes. Getting the ratio wrong hands the crop to Instagram, and Instagram does not ask which part of the picture mattered.

That is the whole argument for deciding the shape yourself before you upload. A 3:2 photograph straight from a camera is 1.5:1, comfortably inside the supported window, so it posts intact. A 16:9 frame is 1.78:1 and also survives. A panorama at 2.5:1 does not, and neither does a phone screenshot at 9:19.5. Those two get cut.

Getting a picture to a supported shape

Choose the target and the crop together. The Instagram photo resizer offers the shapes Instagram’s own sentence supports, fills or fits to whichever you pick, and reports the exact pixel pair that leaves the page.

The square is the simplest case. 1080 × 1080 is still a perfectly ordinary post and it is 1:1, so square image crops or pads to it without any arithmetic on your part.

Type the numbers yourself. Image resizer crops and scales in a single pass, which matters because two separate tools resample twice and each pass costs a little sharpness.

Check what you are starting from. Image dimensions reports the stored size and the displayed size separately — they differ for anything shot on a rotated phone, and it is the displayed pair that decides your ratio.

Weight, not shape. Meta publishes a 30 MB ceiling for feed ads and nothing comparable for ordinary posts. Compress image finds a quality that lands under a byte figure you name while the pixel dimensions stay exactly where you put them.

A story is none of the above. Everything on this page describes the feed, where the ratio band stops at 3:4. A full-screen story is 9:16, taller than anything that sentence covers, and Meta publishes a separate canvas and a separate safe area for it — both collected in Instagram story size.

Checklist

1. 1080 pixels wide. That is the number Instagram publishes, and going above it only means Instagram does the reduction.
2. Height between 566 and 1440. Anything in that band keeps its proportions.
3. 1080 × 1350 if you want the safe default; 1080 × 1440 if you want every pixel of height Instagram’s sentence allows.
4. For paid placements, supply 1440 × 1800 and stay under 30 MB, per the ads guide.
5. Crop deliberately before uploading. An unsupported ratio is cropped for you, by something that cannot tell a face from a background.

Sources

• Instagram Help Center, Photo and video uploads — “we make sure to upload it at the best quality resolution possible (up to a width of 1080 pixels)”, “we keep that photo at its original resolution as long as the photo’s aspect ratio is between 1.91:1 and 3:4 (a width of 1080 pixels with a height between 566 and 1440 pixels)”, and “If the aspect ratio of your photo isn’t supported, it will be cropped to fit a supported ratio”. Read September 7, 2026.
• Meta Ads Guide, Instagram Feed — image — recommended ratio 4:5, recommended resolution 1440 × 1800, maximum file size 30 MB, minimum width 500 pixels, ratio range 400 × 500 to 191 × 100 with a 1% tolerance. Read September 7, 2026.