Instagram carousel size guide.

What size should an Instagram carousel be?

1080 × 1350 pixels (4:5 portrait) is the best size for an Instagram carousel. Square is 1080 × 1080, landscape is 1080 × 566, and every slide should match the ratio of slide one.

Do all carousel slides need the same aspect ratio?

Yes, in effect. Instagram applies the aspect ratio of the first slide to every following slide, so a portrait photo placed after a square first slide is cropped to square and loses its top and bottom.

This is the single most consequential rule in the entire format, and Instagram gives you no warning about it.

When you build a carousel, the aspect ratio you choose on the first slide is applied to every subsequent slide. Choose square for slide one and your beautiful vertical shot on slide four gets its top and bottom cut off. Choose portrait first and your landscape photos get cropped in from the sides.

Instagram does not ask. It does not preview the damage. It crops from the centre and moves on.

There are two ways to handle it:

1. Pick a ratio first, then choose photos that suit it. Decide 4:5 before you start, and let that guide which shots make the cut.
2. Pad the odd ones out. Place a mismatched photo on a background of the correct ratio — a coloured, textured or blurred canvas — so nothing is cut off. This is the standard solution and it usually looks intentional rather than compromised.

The second approach is why so many dumps use paper textures and coloured backgrounds. It started as a fix for a cropping problem and became an aesthetic.

Should you upload photos larger than 1080 pixels?

No — it makes quality worse. Instagram downscales anything wider than 1080 px and then re-encodes it, which is two destructive steps instead of one.

The instinct is that a bigger file must produce a better result. On Instagram the opposite is true.

Here is what happens to a photo wider than 1080 px:

1. Downscale. Instagram resizes it to 1080 px wide. Your 4000 px file loses detail here, permanently.
2. Re-encode. The downscaled result is compressed as a JPEG at roughly 70–80% quality. Fine grain, gradients and micro-contrast degrade in this pass.

Upload at exactly 1080 px and step one never runs. Instagram only re-encodes, so you take one round of loss instead of two. The difference is most visible in skin tones, night photography and anything with a smooth gradient — exactly the areas where compression artefacts show first.

The same logic applies to every app in the chain. If an editor re-compresses your photo before Instagram gets it, you have added a compression pass Instagram was going to perform anyway. The ideal pipeline touches the file as few times as possible.

How does Instagram crop posts in the profile grid?

Instagram displays feed posts at their full ratio but crops every post to 3:4 in your profile grid. A 4:5 portrait loses only a thin strip from the sides; a 1.91:1 landscape loses most of the frame.

Instagram displays feed posts at their full ratio, but your profile grid crops every post to 3:4. This changes what "safe" means depending on which view you are designing for.

Practical consequence: keep faces, text and anything essential away from the extreme edges of your first slide, because that slide is your grid thumbnail. 4:5 is the safest default precisely because it loses the least when cropped to 3:4.

Which aspect ratio should you use?

Use 4:5 portrait by default. It takes the most vertical space in the feed, which means longer on-screen time as someone scrolls, and it survives the 3:4 grid crop better than any other ratio.

4:5 portrait is the default and should be your default too. It occupies the most vertical space in the feed, which means longer on-screen time as someone scrolls past — the single easiest way to increase the chance of a swipe. It also survives the profile grid crop better than anything else.

1:1 square works for structured content. Grid collages, before-and-afters and anything symmetrical read more cleanly as squares. Square also makes mixed-orientation photos easier to pad, since you have equal room on all sides.

1.91:1 landscape is rarely the right answer. It takes the least feed space, gets cropped hardest in the grid, and on a phone it is small. Use it only when the image genuinely needs the width — a horizon, a wide interior — and accept the trade-off.

What size should Instagram carousel videos be?

Export video slides at 1080p in H.264 at 30 fps. Each video slide can run up to 60 seconds and files can be up to 4 GB, but video follows the same ratio rule as photos.

Videos in a carousel follow the same ratio rule as photos: slide one decides, everything else conforms.

Video is compressed harder than photos, and uploading a 4K clip guarantees a transcode down to 1080p before Instagram's own bitrate cap is applied. Export at 1080p yourself and you skip a step that only removes quality.

Should you upload JPEG or PNG to Instagram?

JPEG, saved at 85–95% quality in sRGB. Instagram converts everything to JPEG internally, so uploading a PNG triggers a lossless-to-lossy conversion run by a compressor tuned for file size rather than fidelity.

Use JPEG. Instagram converts everything to JPEG internally, so uploading a PNG means a lossless-to-lossy conversion performed by a compressor tuned for file size, not fidelity. The one exception is an image with genuine transparency — but since Instagram has no transparent background, that transparency is going to be flattened anyway. Flatten it yourself, onto the background you actually want.

Quality 85–95%. Below 80% you are pre-damaging the file. At 100% you produce an enormous file that Instagram will compress to the same place anyway.

sRGB, always. Adobe RGB and ProPhoto get squeezed into sRGB on upload, and colours shift — usually flatter and duller than what you saw when you exported.

How do you handle photos with different aspect ratios?

Pad each photo onto a canvas of your target ratio so nothing is cropped. The alternatives — cropping everything yourself, or only using photos that already match — either lose image area or quietly remove your best shots.

Real camera rolls are not one ratio. You have vertical phone photos, the odd landscape, a square screenshot, a video shot in portrait. Getting them into one carousel without destroying half of them is the practical problem this whole guide leads to.

Three approaches, in order of how good the result looks:

1. Pad each photo onto a canvas of the target ratio. Every image keeps its full frame, nothing is cropped, and the background becomes part of the look. Best result, most work by hand.
2. Crop everything to the target ratio deliberately. You choose what is lost instead of letting Instagram choose from the centre. Fast, but you lose real image area.
3. Only include photos that already match. Simplest, and it quietly removes some of your best shots from consideration.

The first option is what DUMP automates. Canvas pages are built at a fixed ratio you choose once, and every photo you drop in is placed on that canvas — padded, framed or filled — so nothing gets cropped by Instagram later. In Swipe Carousel mode, media that already matches is copied through with zero recompression, so the file Instagram receives is the one your camera made.

Either way, the ratio decision is made before you open Instagram, which is the only place it can be made safely.