Instagram stories: 1080×1920 pixels, 9:16, the full phone screen and the shape Reels use as well. Anything else gets letterboxed with blurred bars or centre-cropped by Instagram without asking. Drop an image and it returns at exactly 1080×1920, cropped where you choose.
The frame divides into three, and only the middle of it is safe:
- Top ~250px: profile ring, account name, close button.
- Bottom ~250px: reply bar, share arrow, reactions.
- Middle ~1400px: the only region visible and untouched on every device.
Backgrounds run edge to edge, which is what makes a story feel full-screen, while anything that has to be read or recognised - text, faces, whatever you are pointing at - stays in the middle band. The crop position slider shifts which slice of the source lands in frame.
Cropping: a landscape (16:9) source keeps only about a third of its width at 9:16. The slider decides which third. Tall phone photos crop far more gently. A scene that can't survive the cut belongs in the feed at 4:5 instead. The post resizer below does that shape.
Encoding: high-quality JPG, because Instagram compresses whatever you upload. Arriving at exact dimensions leaves that single pass as little to do as possible.