Instagram story maker

The number this Instagram story maker builds to

Ask the web what a story measures and you will be told 1080 by 1920, unanimously, by the blogs and by the answer box above them. Open Meta’s own placement page and it says something else: ratio 9:16, resolution 1440 by 2560 pixels. Checked on September 7, 2026. It is the identical shape with a third more pixels in each direction, and it is the default here for the simple reason that it is the figure the platform actually prints.

The familiar pair is the second option rather than an omission. 1080 by 1920 divides to exactly 9:16, sits far above the 500-pixel minimum Meta states, and is often the honest choice: a screenshot or a phone photo already at that width gains nothing from being stretched to 1440, since enlargement invents detail rather than recovering it. What you should not do is invent a third pair. Meta allows a 1% deviation from the ratio, which sounds forgiving until you work it out — a canvas typed by hand as 1080 by 1900 already misses, and a miss is resolved by cropping or padding chosen for you. Both exports here are exact, so that decision never gets taken out of your hands. Every published figure, with its date and its wording, is collected in Instagram story size.

Half the height belongs to the interface

Meta asks you to consider leaving roughly 14 percent of the top, 35 percent of the bottom and 6 percent of each side free of text, logos and other key creative elements, so that the profile icon at one end and the call-to-action at the other do not land on top of them. Switch the overlay on and that rectangle appears while you work: 1268 by 1306 on the full canvas.

Read the two numbers at the top and bottom together, because their sum is the point. Fourteen and thirty-five make forty-nine. Very nearly half of a full-screen story is chrome rather than picture, and that single fact explains most of the stories you have seen with a tagline sliced in half by a reply bar. Nothing was wrong with the typography; it was simply placed in the half that gets covered.

Two qualifications travel with the box. The percentages are Meta’s and the rectangle is arithmetic performed on them here. And the sentence begins with consider and contains roughly, which is the platform telling you it describes where the interface tends to sit rather than a line it has undertaken to hold. Design inside it; do not align to its edge as though it were a specification. A second box, adjustable and off until you turn it on, is there for the margins Meta says nothing about — where your own stickers, polls and link taps habitually fall. Neither box is written into the file. What downloads is your picture and your words, and nothing else.

One file, three placements

Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels and Facebook Stories are given the same geometry on their three separate specification pages: 9:16, 1440 by 2560, a 30 MB ceiling, a 500-pixel minimum width, and word for word the same clearance sentence. Where they differ is in how much accompanying text each allows — 44 characters of primary text for a reels ad against 125 for the other two — and text of that kind is typed into the composer, not baked into the picture.

That is why there is no placement menu on this page and no separate reels version of it. Three destinations for one rectangle would be a switcher wearing a disguise, and the export you make here is already correct for all three.

Fitting a photograph into 9:16

Vertical this extreme is a shape no camera offers, so a photograph arrives with far too much width and has to give most of it up. The picture is enlarged until all four edges are reached and the overflow is dropped; which part overflows is yours to set by dragging in the frame, nudging with the arrow keys, or moving the sliders. Letterboxing would be the alternative, and it is worse, because bars encoded into a file are bars that every viewer sees for as long as the story runs.

The frame is not a rough guide to the result. A single routine paints the editor and the download, separated only by a scale factor, so what you arrange is what you receive. It is also why the type size is set as a share of the canvas height rather than in pixels: change export size and the lettering holds its proportion instead of leaping.

What this page deliberately lacks

No template gallery, no stock library, no account. Feed posts are a different job with a different rule — one width and a band of heights instead of a single canvas — and the Instagram photo resizer is built for that band. Paid work on Facebook wants 4:5 rather than 9:16, which the Facebook ad maker handles at Meta’s stated 1440 by 1800. To reshape artwork you already have to numbers of your own choosing, the image resizer crops and scales in one pass, and image dimensions answers what a file measures both as stored and as displayed, which are two different answers whenever a phone was held sideways. Should an export land above Meta’s 30 MB, compress image searches for a quality that meets a byte target while leaving the dimensions alone.

Your photograph never travels. It is decoded, composed and encoded inside this tab, and this site publishes no endpoint capable of receiving an image in the first place. That claim is meant to be checked rather than believed: keep a network panel open while you build a story, or work through how to verify local processing.