Instagram stories: 1080×1920 pixels, 9:16 — the full phone screen. Reels share the shape. Anything else gets letterboxed with blurred bars or centre-cropped by Instagram without asking. Drop an image; it returns at exactly 1080×1920, cropped where you choose.
Three zones; only the middle 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 — that's what makes a story feel full-screen. Information — text, faces, anything pointed at — stays in the middle band. The crop position slider shifts which slice of the source lands in frame.
Expect a real crop from most photos: 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; Instagram applies its own compression on upload, so the job is arriving with exact dimensions and quality to spare. Everything runs in this page on your device — the only upload is yours, to Instagram.