How to crop a photo for Instagram: 4:5, 1:1, 9:16 and the grid

Upload a photo to Instagram and it picks a crop for you, usually the wrong one. A tall portrait loses its top and bottom; a wide landscape shrinks to a strip. Cropping to the right shape first means you decide what stays. Here are the shapes, and how to hit them exactly.

The shapes Instagram uses

At the time of writing Instagram also accepts 3:4 feed posts, and the profile grid shows every post as a 4:5 rectangle, cropping whatever does not fit. Instagram changes these rules now and then; the ratios above have held for years, the grid shape is the part that moves.

4:5 is the one to know. It is the tallest a feed post can be, so it takes up the most screen as people scroll, and it is what the grid shows, so a 4:5 post appears in the grid exactly as you cropped it.

Cropping to 4:5

1. Open the photo in Raspy and switch to Crop.
2. Choose 4:5 from the ratio row. The frame snaps to that shape and holds it while you drag.
3. Drag inside the frame to move it over the part of the photo that matters. Drag a corner or edge to make it larger or smaller; the ratio stays locked.
4. If the photo is landscape and you want a portrait post, the frame will be a tall slice of it. Decide what to keep; there is no way to fit a wide photo into 4:5 without losing the sides, which is why shooting portrait for Instagram is worth remembering.
5. Save as JPEG at quality 85 to 90. Instagram re-compresses on upload, so higher settings gain nothing.

For a square post, pick 1:1. For a story or reel cover, pick 16:9 and tap Rotate, or rotate first, and the ratio swaps to 9:16; that is how the phone's editor does it too. Instagram's landscape shape, 1.91:1, is not in the list; use Free and watch the size readout on the photo until the width is 1.91 times the height.

Straighten before you crop

A tilted horizon is far more visible in a tight 4:5 crop than in the full photo. Use Straighten first, then set the ratio. Straightening trims the edges slightly, so doing it after cropping can pull the frame off the composition you chose.

Keeping the top and bottom

The most common complaint is a portrait photo, which is 3:4 straight from a phone camera, losing the top of a head when Instagram crops it to 4:5. The two shapes are close but not the same: 4:5 is a little shorter. Cropping to 4:5 yourself lets you slide the frame down to keep the head and lose some floor instead.

Resolution

Instagram resizes anything wider than 1080 pixels down to 1080, so exporting at 50% from a 12-megapixel phone photo, which gives roughly 2000 by 1500, is already more than it will use. Full size is harmless, just slower to upload. The saved file also carries no location metadata, which is one less thing to think about before posting.