Instagram image sizes

Which Instagram size do I actually need?

Instagram has three real canvases and everything else is a variation on one of them. Feed content is 1080 by 1350 at 4:5, or 1080 by 1440 at 3:4 if you want the extra height. Full-screen content, meaning Stories and Reels, is 1080 by 1920 at 9:16. Avatars are a centred square that gets masked into a circle.

Work out which canvas you are on before you worry about pixels. A graphic exported for the feed pushed into a Story will be pillarboxed onto a background, and a 9:16 Story frame posted to the feed is cut back to 3:4. Those are two separate exports, not one file resized.

The one number that never changes is the width. Instagram resamples every upload to 1080 pixels wide, so exporting a 4000 pixel master does not buy you sharpness. It buys you a slower upload and a second round of compression.

What changed with the Instagram grid?

Instagram moved profile tiles from a 1:1 square to a 3:4 portrait preview in early 2025, a change Instagram head Adam Mosseri put down to the fact that most uploads are now vertical. Anything written before that which tells you to design for a square grid is out of date.

The practical effect is small but real. A 4:5 post has a ratio of 0.8 and the tile is 0.75, so the tile is filled by height and about 34 pixels are trimmed from each side. A 1:1 square post loses far more, roughly 135 pixels from each side, which is why squares now look worse on a profile than they used to.

Four months later, on 29 May 2025, Instagram added native 3:4 support for single photos and carousels, which is the part most guides missed. 3:4 is the grid tile's own ratio, so a 1080 by 1440 upload is cropped by nothing at all on your profile. If the layout has a logo or a wide headline anywhere near the left or right edge, that is the export to use.

So the grid points at one conclusion: design at 4:5 as the default and reach for 3:4 when the edges matter, keep important content off the outer edges either way, and the same file works in the feed and on your profile.

How often do Instagram sizes change?

The core dimensions have been remarkably stable. 1080 pixels wide has been the upload target for years and 9:16 for full-screen content matches every competing app.

The ratios around them do move, and the last two changes both caught the size-guide industry out. In January 2025 profile tiles went from 1:1 to 3:4, and in May 2025 the feed started accepting 3:4 photos, ending 4:5's long run as the tallest single feed image. Guides that were written before either change still read as authoritative, because a pixel number does not look stale the way a screenshot does.

That is the argument for dating a reference rather than putting a year in its headline. Every spec page here records the date it was last checked, whether the number comes from the platform's own documentation or from convention, and what it was checked against. If a number matters to a paid campaign, check it against the platform's own help pages too, because no third-party reference can promise it has not moved this week.