Instagram Story size and dimensions

The exact Instagram Story size

Instagram Stories use a fixed canvas: 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels tall. That is a 9:16 aspect ratio: portrait, matching the proportions of a modern phone screen held upright. Every Story, whether a photo, a video or plain text, is shown inside this frame.

1080 × 1920 is the resolution Instagram displays Stories at, so it is the resolution to design and export at. You can upload something larger and Instagram scales it down, but uploading anything narrower than 1080 px forces Instagram to upscale it, which looks soft. Treat 1080 px wide as the practical minimum; 720 × 1280 is the absolute floor and is best avoided.

The Story safe zone

Instagram lays its own interface on top of every Story, and that interface covers parts of your image. Anything in those areas — a caption, a logo, a call to action — can end up hidden behind a button or hard to read.

There are two zones to keep clear:

• Top ~250 px: your profile picture, account name and the timestamp sit here.
• Bottom ~250 px: the Send message reply bar sits here, along with link stickers and other interactive elements.

That leaves a safe zone of roughly 1080 × 1420 px through the centre of the canvas. Keep headlines, captions, logos and buttons inside it.

One honest caveat: Instagram does not publish official safe-zone measurements, and its interface shifts slightly between phone models and app updates. The ~250 px figures are careful community measurements, not exact specs, so treat them as a comfortable margin to stay clear of rather than a precise line.

File size and format limits

Instagram accepts several file types for Stories, with separate limits for photos and videos:

Although a video can technically be up to 4 GB, smaller files upload faster and come through Instagram’s compression with fewer artefacts, so aiming under about 100 MB is a good habit.

How long can a Story video be?

A Story video can run up to 60 seconds and now plays as one continuous clip. It was not always this way: until a 2022 change, Instagram automatically chopped any video longer than 15 seconds into separate 15-second cards. Videos under a minute now play uninterrupted.

A video longer than 60 seconds is trimmed: either you trim it before posting, or Instagram splits the remainder onto additional Story frames. Trimming it yourself gives you control over exactly which 60 seconds your audience sees.

What happens if you use the wrong size

Upload something that is not 9:16 and Instagram has to force it to fit:

• A landscape or square image is placed on a generated background, with large empty bands above and below it.
• A photo taller or wider than 9:16 is cropped, and you do not always control which part is kept.
• A low-resolution image is stretched to fill 1080 × 1920 and looks soft or pixelated.

The fix is straightforward: start from a 1080 × 1920 canvas, or use a tool that fits your content to it before it reaches Instagram.

An easier way to get the size right

Resizing every photo, clip or screenshot to 1080 × 1920 by hand is tedious. to Stories does it for you: share a photo, video, web page, tweet or YouTube clip into the app and it formats the result for the 9:16 Story canvas — correct dimensions, important content clear of the unsafe zones — ready to post.

On a desktop or anywhere without an iPhone, the free Instagram Story collage maker draws straight onto a 1080 × 1920 canvas in your browser and saves a PNG at that exact size, with no upload and no sign-up.