Resize an image for Instagram

Instagram displays feed images at 1080 pixels wide and downsamples anything larger, so 1080 across is the useful ceiling. Within that, it supports three shapes: 1:1 square at 1080 by 1080, 4:5 portrait at 1080 by 1350, and 1.91:1 landscape at 1080 by 566. Instagram does not publish exact specifications, so these are the figures independent industry references consistently report - the page says which numbers come from observed behaviour and which from consensus.

Because Instagram only accepts those three shapes, and your photograph is probably a different one. By default the tool takes the largest rectangle of the chosen shape from the centre, which is predictable and sometimes cuts out whoever was standing to one side. If that happens, tick "Frame the crop on the picture" on this page: the rectangle is then placed where the texture and colour differ most from the rest of the image, and the result says which framing was used. Nothing is detected - no faces, no objects. You can also crop it yourself first with the crop tool.

Yes. The preset strips metadata, so the GPS coordinates your phone recorded do not travel with the image. This is worth caring about: a photo posted straight from a camera roll can carry the exact spot it was taken, and social platforms are not the place to publish that. You can confirm what was in the file first with the metadata viewer.

It will be re-encoded as JPEG, which is lossy, but at high quality and only once. Uploading a larger file would not help, because Instagram would downsample and re-compress it anyway - doing that step here, once and carefully, generally looks better than letting it happen twice.

No limit is applied by this tool, because no reliable figure for Instagram's maximum upload size could be established. Compressing your photo to satisfy a rule that may not exist would reduce its quality for nothing, so the tool optimises for the dimensions it can justify and leaves the size alone.

No. The crop, the resize and the metadata removal all happen inside your browser, and your photo is never sent to a server. That is the opposite of how most social media resizers work, and it means your photo reaches Instagram from you rather than from an intermediary.