Instagram reel size

Every Instagram reel size, in pixels

A reel has one frame and two crops of it. The video plays full screen, and its cover is then shown as a square on your profile and as a taller rectangle in the feed, both taken from the same file.

• Reel frame: 1080x1920px, a ratio of 9:16. What the video and its cover are played at, edge to edge.
• Cover, as your grid shows it: 1080x1080px, a ratio of 1:1. The profile grid takes a square out of the middle of the cover.
• Cover, as the feed shows it: 1080x1350px, a ratio of 4:5. A taller crop of the same cover, used where the reel appears in the feed.
• Because two crops come out of one cover, anything important has to sit in the overlap: the middle of the frame, well clear of the top and the bottom.
• The action column and the caption cover the lower right of a playing reel, which is precisely where people tend to put a logo.
• A reel uploaded below the full frame width is upscaled, and moving video shows that softness far more readily than a still does.
• The cover can be swapped after posting and the video cannot, so the crop on the video itself is the one worth getting right first.

Check a file you already have against the Instagram reel size

The file people check here is usually a cover exported from a design tool or a still pulled out of the footage, and the question is whether it survives two different crops rather than one.

1. 1Pick the target first. This page carries 3 Instagram reel sizes, and a verdict only means something against one of them.
2. 2Choose your image. It is opened by this browser tab and measured on a canvas, so the file never leaves the machine you are sitting at and there is no queue or upload to wait for.
3. 3Read the result: an exact match at 1080x1920, the same 9:16 shape at a different scale, or a crop with the axis that loses pixels named.
4. 4If it is wrong, open the Instagram resizer linked underneath. It exports to these exact numbers instead of leaving the decision to the platform.
5. 5Run the cover through twice, once against the frame and once against the grid square, since both of those crops come out of the same file.

What Instagram does when the shape is wrong

A reel of the wrong shape is not refused. It is laid on a blurred or black background and scaled to fit, which reads instantly as a video made for somewhere else and reposted here.

• A landscape video becomes a small strip in the middle of the screen with bands above and below, and the caption then covers part of what is left.
• A square video keeps its width and leaves shallower gaps, which is the tell that a reel was cut out of a feed post.
• A cover whose subject sits low looks fine full screen and headless on your profile, because the grid square is taken from the middle.

The cover matters less than the first second

Sizes are worth getting right, and it is equally worth knowing where they stop mattering. A reel is chosen by what happens in its opening moment far more than by the still sitting in front of it.

• Reels are mostly watched from the feed, where the cover is a frame nobody chose to look at, so the first moving second is what holds people.
• The grid cover is the one that lasts, because it is what somebody browsing your profile in a month actually sees.
• Text burned into a cover is fixed forever, while a caption can be edited, which is a good reason to keep the words out of the picture.