Instagram new grid size: 2026 sizes, safe area and why your photos get cut off

Instagram’s profile grid no longer shows squares. Since January 2025 it shows each post as a taller rectangle, 3:4 by most measurements, cut from the middle of the post. Post at 4:5 (1080 x 1350 pixels) and the grid trims about 34 pixels from each side. Post at 3:4 (1080 x 1440) and nothing is cut.

Checked on November 4, 2026, against Meta’s developer docs and Instagram’s help pages, all linked below. Instagram hasn’t published the grid’s ratio on any page we could open, so wherever a figure isn’t official, this page says so.

Your posts themselves didn’t change. In the feed, and when someone taps a post on your profile, the whole image shows. Only the thumbnails on your profile grid are cropped, and they’re what a new visitor sees first.

What changed, and when

For most of Instagram’s life the grid was square. When Instagram first allowed portrait and landscape posts, its 2015 announcement said a post that isn’t square would appear on your profile “as a center-cropped square”, while the feed showed the full-sized version.

Then came three changes:

Mosseri’s reason for the first change: most of what people upload, photos and videos, is vertical, and “it just is a bummer to overly crop them.” For the second, he called 3:4 “the format that almost every phone camera defaults to” and said a 3:4 image would now “appear just exactly as you shot it.” Those posts live on Instagram and Threads; the quotes here come from the press reports linked, which quoted them at the time.

What Instagram didn’t publish is the grid’s exact ratio. It isn’t in the Help Center or in Meta’s developer docs as of today. The 3:4 figure comes from people who measured the new grid, like Kapwing’s guide, and it’s the ratio the rest of this page uses.

Instagram new grid size: every size in one table

Pixel sizes are worked out at 1080 pixels wide, the width in Instagram’s own help article. The “Where the ratio comes from” column says which page we found it on today. The last column assumes the 3:4 grid, which was measured by others, not published by Instagram.

Three things worth knowing about these numbers:

• Width. Instagram’s help article on resolution says photos upload at up to 1080 pixels wide, and keep their resolution when the aspect ratio is between 1.91:1 and 3:4, so 1080 x 566 to 1080 x 1440. Anything outside that range is cropped to fit. Meta’s developer reference accepts images from 320 to 1440 pixels wide and scales anything outside that range. 1080 wide fits both pages.
• The file. Through the API, the same reference asks for a JPEG of 8 MB at most, in sRGB color; other color spaces are converted.
• The grid in pixels. There’s no grid file size to export at. The grid shows a crop of your post, scaled to whatever phone is looking at it. A thumbnail size of about 1012 x 1350 is that crop on a 4:5 post, not a separate image you need to make.

Where the crop falls

The grid tile is narrower than a 4:5 or a square post, so for most posts it’s the sides that get cut, not the top and bottom. Only posts taller than 3:4, like a 9:16 reel cover, lose their top and bottom.

The crop comes from the middle. Instagram described its grid thumbnails as center crops in 2015, and Kapwing’s guide found the new grid also crops from the center unless you change the thumbnail yourself. Here’s how much each shape loses:

Two things follow. A 4:5 post barely changes on the grid, which is why it’s still the safe default for designed posts. And every square post you made before 2025, including any multi-post “puzzle” layouts, now loses an eighth of its width on each side.

Keep text and products inside the safe area

The safe area is the part of a post that shows both in the feed and on the grid. On a 1080 x 1350 post, it’s the middle 1012 pixels of the width, at full height.

A template you can set up in any design tool

• 4:5 post (1080 x 1350). Add vertical guides at 34 and 1046 pixels from the left. Everything outside them disappears on the grid. Then keep text further in: a line that touches the crop looks cramped at thumbnail size, so a margin of about 100 pixels on each side is a comfortable rule of thumb.
• 3:4 post (1080 x 1440). No crop guides needed. Keep the same comfortable margin so titles don’t run to the edge.
• Reel cover (1080 x 1920). Add horizontal guides at 240 and 1680 pixels from the top. Keep the title and the product between them.
• Carousel. Design the first slide as the cover. Meta’s publishing docs say “carousel images are all cropped based on the first image in the carousel”, and Instagram’s carousel announcement says the first photo or video is the one on your profile grid. Put the title and the product in the middle of that first slide.

Product photos

Square product shots are the ones to watch. Posted as they are, they lose 135 pixels from each side on the grid, which is often where a handle, a sleeve or a price tag sits. Two fixes:

1. Scale the photo to about 900 pixels wide and place it in the middle of a 1080 x 1350 canvas on your brand color. The whole product then shows in the feed and on the grid.
2. Reshoot or recrop at 3:4 or 4:5, with the product in the middle and some air on both sides.

Small products suffer most, because the thumbnail is tiny to begin with: for a ring or a pair of earrings, fill the safe area rather than the whole frame. Our post ideas for jewelry businesses and for online stores cover what to put in those posts. For the rest of your profile (your bio, your link, the mix of posts, your posting days), The 15-minute grid fix has 12 fixes a store can make in one sitting.

Why did Instagram cut off my photo?

Go down this list in order: the first causes are the most common.

1. It’s only the grid thumbnail. Check: tap the post on your profile. If the whole image shows, nothing was lost. Fix: nothing to repair. Design your next posts for the 3:4 crop, or edit how this one’s thumbnail is framed (see below).
2. The post is square or landscape. Check: does the cut fall on the left and right? Square posts lose 12.5% of their width on each side, landscape posts about 30%. Fix: post at 4:5 or 3:4 from now on. For an old post, edit its thumbnail framing.
3. Text or a product sits near the left or right edge of a 4:5 design. Check: add guides at 34 and 1046 pixels to your design file. Fix: move everything important inside them, with room to spare.
4. The original photo is taller than the post can be. Check: is it a screenshot or a 9:16 photo? Both are taller than the 3:4 shape Instagram added to the app in 2025, and taller than the 4:5 limit in Meta’s API docs. Fix: crop it yourself to 3:4 or 4:5 before you post, so you choose what stays. Instagram’s help confirms you can crop a photo before sharing it.
5. Carousel slides look cut. Check: is the first slide a different shape from the others? Fix: make every slide the same ratio. The first slide sets the shape for all of them, per Meta’s publishing docs.
6. A reel cover lost its title on the grid. Check: is the text in the top or bottom 240 pixels of a 1080 x 1920 cover? Fix: keep it in the middle 1440 pixels.

Editing a thumbnail after you post

Instagram has rolled out a way to change how a post is framed on your profile grid after it’s live: Social Media Today reported it on March 1, 2026. Instagram hasn’t published the steps on a Help Center page we could open today, and its menus change often, so we don’t list menu names here that may already be out of date.

4:5 or 3:4: which should your store post?

Both show in full in the feed, and the grid crops both to 3:4, so they sit side by side without a problem. The choice comes down to how you post.

• Posting from the app? 3:4 is the only shape the grid doesn’t cut, and it’s the shape most phone cameras shoot by default, as Mosseri put it. It’s the easy choice for photos straight from your phone.
• Posting with a scheduling tool? Tools that post for you go through Meta’s API, and Meta’s developer reference says images “must be within a 4:5 to 1.91:1 range.” On the day we checked, 3:4 wasn’t in that range, so 4:5 is the tallest shape a scheduled post can be. Our guide to automating Instagram posts covers the rest of what the API allows.
• Designing graphics? 4:5 at 1080 x 1350 gives you one file that works through every tool, with a grid crop that takes only about 3% off each side.

Season works the 4:5 way. It makes your store’s posts from your products, photos and prices, as 4:5 images that the grid shows cropped to 3:4, plans 3 months of them on a calendar and publishes them at set times through Instagram’s official API. It opens soon: get early access.

To plan which post goes where once your sizes are sorted, the free content calendar lays out your weeks.