Instagram Post Size: Feed, the 3:4 Grid, Carousels and Ad Crops (2026)

Make an Instagram post 1080 x 1350 pixels (4:5). Instagram accepts anything from 1080 x 566 landscape to 1080 x 1440 (3:4), but since 2025 the two places your post ends up disagree: the profile grid crops every post to 3:4, while boosts, ads and scheduling tools stop at 4:5. Our read after checking 75 recent brand posts: export 4:5 at 1440 x 1800 with the edges kept clear, and save 3:4 for posts you publish from the app and will never promote.

Anything taller than 3:4 or wider than 1.91:1 gets cropped on upload, per Instagram's photo size page. The 4:5 pixel math and where else that shape gets cropped are on our 4:5 aspect ratio page.

Your profile grid shows every post as a 3:4 tile

Start with where your post gets cut. Instagram switched the profile grid from squares to rectangles in January 2025 and never published the new ratio. We measured the tiles on instagram.com: exactly 3:4. A post still opens whole when someone taps it, but the grid is what a new visitor sees first, and it shows only the center 3:4 of whatever you upload.

One photo, four shapes

What the 3:4 profile tile keeps from each post

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In the feedOn the grid

1:1 1080 x 1080135 px off each side4:5 1080 x 1350About 34 px off each sideTile shows 1012 x 1350. Anything 60 px in from the edge survives.3:4 1080 x 1440Nothing cut1.91:1 1080 x 566328 px off each side

On a 4:5 post the loss is small, about 34 px a side, so the fix is cheap: keep the logo, price and any text inside the center 1012 px. Squares and landscapes lose much more. If a crop lands badly, Adjust Preview in the post's three-dot menu moves it after posting, and the free safe-zone checker draws the grid lines on a 4:5 design before you post. Reels share the same tiles and lose 240 px top and bottom, which matters because about half the top 12 tiles on the brand profiles we opened were Reels.

3:4 fills the tile, and it's the shape you can't boost

Posting everything at 3:4 would skip the crop, but the rest of Meta stops at 4:5. Try to boost a 3:4 post and the app refuses, with a message advertisers have been quoting since June 2025. No Meta help page mentions it, but the spec explains it: Instagram feed ads allow 4:5 at the tallest with 1% tolerance, and 3:4 is 6.7% taller.

The 90 px that decide it

4:5 against 3:4, from the feed to the boost button

4:5 1080 x 13503:4 1080 x 1440

4:5 ad limit+90 px

Boost post

Boost unavailable. Posts with a vertical 3:4 aspect ratio can't be used for ads.

• ✓Height in the feed1440 px, 90 px more
• ✓Profile gridShown whole
• ✕Boost or run as an adBoost unavailable
• ✕Scheduling toolsAPI stops at 4:5

Scheduling tools hit the same wall. They publish through Instagram's content API, which takes 4:5 to 1.91:1 and nothing taller, so a 3:4 post has to come from the app. That makes the trade simple: 3:4 buys 90 px of feed height and a clean grid tile, and costs you every way of putting money or a scheduler behind the post. If you already posted a 3:4 you now want to boost, re-crop it to 4:5 and post it again, or run it through the Meta Ad Resizer so nothing gets cut. The other reasons a boost gets rejected have their own page.

Brands use 3:4 for carousels and 4:5 for the rest

We wanted to see how brands settle that trade, so on October 10, 2026 we opened the first three photo or carousel posts on 27 brand profiles, from Nike and Glossier to IKEA and Starbucks.

4:5 won easily, at 71% of posts. The 3:4 posts are the interesting part: 18 of 19 were carousels, from brands like Glossier, SKIMS, Aesop and Starbucks. That matches the trade above. A carousel of lifestyle shots is something you post once from the app to make the grid look good. A single product shot is the post you might put money behind next week. We'd copy that split. The sample shows what brands post, not what performs.

Export at 1440 wide, not 1080

Once the shape is settled, the other number every size guide repeats is 1080 wide. Instagram's help page says it too: upload bigger and "we size it down to a width of 1080 pixels." The files in our sample say otherwise.

Half the photos were stored wider than 1080, and 23 of the 30 accounts had at least one. Instagram also makes smaller copies for display, and those came back at an estimated JPEG quality of 61, so we can't promise a 4K upload looks sharper on someone's phone. What we'd do is export at 1440 wide (1440 x 1800 for 4:5): it's Meta's recommended feed-ad size, the widest file a scheduling tool can send, and Instagram keeps it.

Carousels: one shape for every card, and card one is the tile

Carousels use the same sizes with two extra rules. Every card takes the carousel's shape: Instagram's carousel help page says you can't pick a different orientation per photo, and all 62 carousels in our sample held one ratio across every card, videos included. Some guides describe a Mixed option that pads shorter photos with bars instead of cropping them; we haven't tested it. The grid shows only the first card, so lead with the image that works as a 3:4 tile.

The app takes up to 20 cards. Scheduling tools and carousel ads stop at 10, and carousel ads want 4:5 for images or 1:1 if any card is a video. A carousel you might promote later should stay at 10 cards in 4:5.

Instagram post size FAQ