All sites I can find claim Instagram portraits have a 4:5 aspect ratio at 1080x1350px. According to my testing that’s flat-out wrong
This testing was done on a desktop PC and a Samsung A52 smartphone. All Software is up-to-date.
Mobile messes up the Aspect Ratio by cropping height: When I use my phone to upload a 4:5 photo the top and bottom get cut off. The app crops my portrait posts to 8:9, 1080x1210px resolution, and that resolution is not even entirely consistent. The missing portion doesn’t appear when you look at it on desktop. It’s not hidden. It’s fully hard-cropped out of the image file.
PC uploads do use 4:5 but have higher resolutions: Unlike mobile any desktop uploads actually do tell you the aspect ratio your post will have before you upload, and it actually does stick to the 4:5. However, the common claim that it will be posted in 1080x1350 is wrong here. The resolution is far higher. My photo got cropped to 1440x1800px!
wadsadgs
Interesting find on the r/photography subreddit. Indeed, every article I’ve seen recommends an upload resolution of 1080 for the horizontal edge of the image (1080 × 1080px for square posts, 1080 × 566px for landscape posts, 1080 × 1350px for portrait posts). I’ve always found that choice somewhat odd, as it translates into a smaller resolution for landscape images, but I guess Instagram only cares about the horizontal pixel density, to fill the width of a mobile screen in a consistent manner.
Curious if something had changed, I did my own testing with the web inspector on Instagram’s desktop site. I looked at the intrinsic size of a random sample of images in my feed, and there does seem to be a much wider variety of resolutions in the mix, especially for landscape images. One of them went up to 2067 × 1440px, so a short edge of 1440px, considerably larger than expected. But I’ve also seen portrait posts in the old 1080 × 1350px size.
Granted, this could be because Instagram doesn’t limit the aspect ratio for landscape as it does for portrait, where you can only upload 4:5 images, so people feel more freedom to upload in whatever resolution they choose. Nevertheless, it does seem like Instagram increased the resolution used to render still posts sometime recently – one of the comments on the post suggests the beginning of April.
My own recent posts are all rendered with the smaller, 1080px horizontal edge, but that’s because I upload files at those dimensions, based on the recommendations mentioned above. Time to update my Lightroom export preset, I guess!
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