How to crop video for Instagram
Your reel plays at 9:16 and previews on your profile inside a 3:4 rectangle. Anything you centred for one gets cut by the other, which is why so many covers lose their own headline.
7 minute read
Instagram crops your video more than once
The mistake is treating this as a single decision. A reel plays full screen at 9:16, previews on your profile inside a 3:4 rectangle, and shows up in the feed at a third size, and Instagram derives all of those from the one file by cropping again each time. So a cover frame you carefully centred for the player loses its top and bottom in the grid, and a headline that sat comfortably in the vertical frame gets its first and last words trimmed. Buffer's sizing guide is blunt about the consequence: keep the important part of the visual centred within the 3:4 grid ratio so it survives the preview. Crop for the surface you are publishing to, then look at what the grid does to it before you accept the upload.
The ratios, and the ones Instagram will not take
Reels and Stories are 1080x1920 at 9:16, and that is the export to default to. Feed video is a different shape: Buffer's size guide puts the preferred feed post at 1080x1350, a 4:5 portrait, with 1080x1080 square and 1080x566 landscape as the alternatives. The part people miss is that the accepted ranges are narrower than assumed. Buffer's help centre documents Instagram as taking images between 3:4 and 1.91:1, portrait images between 0.75 and 0.99, landscape images between 1.01 and 1.91, and landscape video only up to 1.78. A standard 16:9 video is 1.78 exactly, so it just squeezes in. Anything wider — a 2.39:1 cinematic crop, an ultrawide screen recording — does not, and gets cropped for you.
The 3:4 grid crop is the one that bites
In January 2025 Instagram replaced the square profile grid with a taller 3:4 rectangle, and it re-crops everything to fit. Coverage at the time from Planoly and Kapwing described the same behaviour: the grid preview is centre-cropped, so horizontal images lose their sides while vertical and square ones lose their top and bottom, and the original still opens at its full ratio when someone taps it. For video this means your cover frame gets judged twice. The fix is not complicated, it is just a step almost everyone skips. Put faces, headline text and logos toward the middle of the frame, and when you upload a reel, open the profile grid tab on the cover screen and set that crop yourself rather than taking whatever Instagram chooses.
Crop for the safe area, not the frame edge
Every Instagram surface draws its own interface over your video, so the usable area is always smaller than the file. Buffer's guide suggests keeping roughly 250 pixels clear at the top and bottom of a Story, and reels are similar in shape if not in exact numbers: the handle, caption, audio ticker and side buttons take the bottom and the right edge, and the top carries the app's own chrome. In practice that means composing so the speaker's eyes sit in the upper third and burned-in captions live above the platform's caption bar rather than underneath it. Published pixel figures differ between guides because the interface itself changes with caption length, so treat any single number as approximate and check the real thing in the app before a launch you cannot redo.
Crop in your editor, not on the upload screen
Instagram lets you pinch and drag to reframe while uploading, which is fine in an emergency and a poor place to make the decision. You are judging composition on a phone-sized preview, you cannot keyframe anything, and the app re-encodes whatever you hand it regardless, so you are giving it a file that has already lost information. Crop and export at the target ratio first, then upload something Instagram only has to compress rather than reshape. The one thing genuinely worth doing in the app is the cover, because that is where the grid crop lives, and it stays editable after publishing — you can change a reel's cover later, which is a cheap fix for a thumbnail that turned out unreadable at grid size.
Static crop, moving crop, or stop cropping
For one person on a fixed camera, a static crop centred on them is the correct answer and nothing further is needed. It stops working the instant there are two people, because the middle of a wide two-shot is the gap between them: the crop frames empty space and clips both faces at the edges. From there you have two honest options. Animate the crop so it sits on whoever is speaking, moving on existing cuts so the change hides inside an edit the viewer already expects. Or stop cropping and stack both people in their own windows, keeping the reactions you would otherwise throw away. Screen recordings and slides usually want the second treatment too, since a vertical slice of a slide cannot be read. Decide per shot, not per project.
Get it right once and stop re-cropping
Most accounts do not need four exports. One 9:16 master at 1080x1920 covers Reels and Stories, a 4:5 version handles feed posts if you use them, and the grid crop is a per-post choice made inside the app. The work that genuinely recurs is the cover, because that is the frame that has to survive the 3:4 preview. If you are producing clips in volume rather than one at a time, the cropping decision is the one worth handing off, since its shape is identical for every clip cut from the same recording. FrameOS reframes long footage into vertical clips with the framing following whoever is speaking and burns the captions in the same pass. 300 credits for 3 days · no card.
FAQ
What size should a video be for Instagram?
Reels and Stories are 1080x1920 at 9:16. Feed video is best at 1080x1350, a 4:5 portrait, with 1080x1080 square and 1080x566 landscape as the other accepted shapes. If you only want one export, make it 1080x1920, since that covers both Reels and Stories and is what the algorithm surfaces to non-followers.
Why does my Instagram video look cropped on my profile?
Because the profile grid is a separate crop. Instagram switched the grid from square to a 3:4 rectangle in January 2025 and centre-crops every post to fit it, so vertical covers lose their top and bottom. The full version still opens when someone taps it. Adjust the crop in the profile grid tab on the cover screen when you post.
Can I post a 16:9 landscape video to Instagram?
Just about. Buffer's help centre puts Instagram's accepted landscape video range at 1.01 to 1.78, and 16:9 is exactly 1.78, so it fits with nothing to spare. Anything wider than that gets cropped. It will also occupy a small strip of a phone screen in a vertical feed, so accepted and advisable are not the same thing here.
Can I change a reel's cover after posting?
Yes, and it is worth doing if the grid crop turned out badly. Reel covers stay editable after publishing, including the separate profile grid crop, so a thumbnail whose headline got cut in half can be fixed without deleting and reposting the video. Reposting would cost you the reach the original has already accumulated.
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