Resize images for Instagram’s 1080×1440 post size

Instagram’s portrait feed post is 3:4, 1080×1440 pixels. Square posts (1080×1080) and 4:5 posts (1080×1350) are still supported, and Stories and Reels use 9:16, 1080×1920. Image Resize has presets for all of them.

The important question for any resize preset is what happens when your photo is not already that shape. A phone photo is normally 4:3 in landscape or 3:4 in portrait. A landscape photo does not become a portrait post by resizing it.

What the 3:4 preset does to a landscape photo

We resized a 4032×3024 landscape iPhone photo (2.06 MB) with the “Instagram post 3:4” preset and the aspect lock on, which is the default. The output was 1080×810 pixels and 185 KB.

The tool fit the photo inside a 1080×1440 box without stretching it. The width reached 1080 first, so the height stopped at 810. It did not crop to 3:4 and it did not add bars to fill the remaining height. That is deliberate: a resizer that crops has to guess what to cut off, and it will sometimes cut off a head. But it means the file you upload is still a landscape image, and Instagram will crop or frame it according to its own rules.

If you turn the aspect lock off, you get exactly 1080×1440, stretched to fit. That is almost never what you want for a photo of people or text.

Crop first, then resize

To get a true 3:4 post, crop before resizing. We cropped the same photo to 3:4 around its center (2268×3024 pixels) and resized it with the same preset. The output was exactly 1080×1440, 325 KB, from a 2.12 MB crop.

Most phone photo editors have aspect-ratio presets in their crop tool. A 4:3 crop turned to portrait orientation is 3:4. Choose what stays in the frame yourself: a center crop of a landscape photo keeps only the middle 56% of the width (2268 of 4032 pixels), which is fine for a single subject in the middle and bad for a group photo.

File size and quality

Compression is on by default at quality 82, and the output is a JPEG. In our tests, the 2.06 MB photo became 185 KB at 1080×810, and the 2.12 MB crop became 325 KB at 1080×1440.

Instagram processes every upload again on its side, so there is little reason to upload a multi-megabyte file for a 1080-pixel post. There is also little reason to push the quality setting very low, because the image will be compressed a second time after upload. If you want to hand Instagram as much detail as possible, raise the quality or turn compression off. At 1080 pixels the file will still be a fraction of the original.

Location data is removed

Phone photos usually carry EXIF data, including GPS coordinates. We added GPS coordinates and a camera model to a test photo and resized it. The output JPEG contained no EXIF data at all: the resize draws the image again and writes a new file, and the metadata does not come along. This matters most when you share the file directly, in a chat, by email, or on a site that keeps the original file.

The opposite is true of JPG to PDF, which embeds the original JPEG unchanged. The JPG vs PDF guide shows GPS data surviving inside a PDF.

Sizes at a glance

Instagram shows feed images at up to 1080 pixels wide. A larger upload is scaled down by Instagram’s own resizer, and a smaller one is scaled up and looks soft on a large phone screen. Resizing to exactly 1080 pixels wide yourself means you choose the crop and the compression, and nothing is scaled again except by Instagram’s re-encoding.

The same rule applies to every row: crop to the ratio first, then resize.

Several photos at once

Drop several images and they all get the same preset. When there is more than one output, the files download together as a ZIP. If the photos have different orientations, crop each one to the target ratio first; otherwise the landscape ones will come out 1080 pixels wide and short, like the first test above.

Posting a PDF page

To post a page from a PDF, such as a flyer or a slide, export it with PDF to JPG first. At 2× a US Letter page came out at 1224×1584 pixels in our test. Letter is slightly wider than 3:4 (a ratio of 0.773 against 0.75), so crop a sliver from the sides, about 1188×1584, and then resize.

Checklist

1. Crop to the target ratio on your phone or computer.
2. Drop the cropped photos on Image Resize and keep the matching preset.
3. Leave compression on unless you want maximum detail.
4. Check the output dimensions shown before downloading.

How we measured

Measured on 27 September 2026 with this site’s Image Resize and PDF to JPG tools in Chrome on a Linux desktop, using 4032×3024 iPhone photos published on Wikimedia Commons. EXIF data was added and checked with Pillow. Sizes are as the tool displays them.