Instagram story size: 1080×1920 with safe zones

Stories are compressed harder than feed posts. Instagram assumes a story is disposable, so it encodes it at a lower quality and scales it aggressively when the source is large. A screenshot or a 12 MP photo dropped straight into a story is the classic recipe for mush.

Sending a 1080×1920 JPEG that already sits under about 1.5 MB gives the app much less to do. In our tests the difference is most visible on text and thin lines, which is exactly what most stories contain.

Instagram overlays the story with your profile name and the progress bar at the top, and with the reply box and share buttons at the bottom. Anything inside those bands gets covered on most phones.

• Keep text and faces inside the middle 1080×1420 area.
• Stickers, polls and links are added inside the app, so leave room for them.
• The same frame works for reels covers, but the profile grid crops covers to the centre 3:4, so keep the important part centred.

A normal 4:3 or 3:2 photo has to be cropped a lot to become 9:16. Two honest options: crop with the drag control above and accept the loss, or keep the photo whole and let Instagram add a blurred or coloured background in the app. If you go the second route, still resize the photo to 1080 px wide first so the visible part stays sharp.