Resize Video for Instagram
Instagram has three shapes, not one, and which you need depends on where the video is going: 1080 × 1920 for Reels and Stories, 1080 × 1350 for a portrait feed post, 1080 × 1080 for square. Reels is filled in to start with. Pick the placement, drag the box over the part of the picture that matters, and the reframe runs on your own machine.
What to know about Instagram
Three placements, three different crops
A Reel is full-screen vertical, a feed post is a taller-than-wide card in a scrolling column, and a square works in both without excelling at either. They are not interchangeable: a 9:16 Reel posted to the feed gets its top and bottom cut off by the feed's own 4:5 maximum, which is exactly the crop nobody chose. Decide the destination first, then the frame.
The Reels interface sits on top of your video
Captions, the audio pill, the profile row and the action buttons down the right-hand edge are all drawn over the picture, not beside it. Roughly the bottom quarter and the top eighth of a Reel are partly obscured in the feed, so the crop box wants the subject in the middle band rather than dead centre of the full frame.
Upload bigger than you think you need
Instagram re-encodes everything that arrives, and it re-encodes a soft file into a softer one. Sending 1080 × 1920 rather than 720 × 1280 costs nothing at the upload stage and gives the platform's own encoder more to work with, which is the whole difference between a Reel that looks fine and one that looks smeared on a good phone screen.
What each shape costs at 1080 × 1920
| Your source | Crop to fill loses | Fit with bars adds |
|---|---|---|
| 1920 × 1080 · 16:9 landscape | 68% of the picture | 656px top and bottom |
| 1080 × 1920 · 9:16 vertical | nothing — same shape | no bars — same shape |
| 1080 × 1080 · 1:1 square | 44% of the picture | 420px top and bottom |
| 1440 × 1080 · 4:3 standard | 58% of the picture | 555px top and bottom |
The crop figures assume the box sits where the tool opens it, centred and as large as the frame allows; dragging it changes where the loss falls, never how much of it there is. That is the trade this page exists to make visible — you can see it here, and you can see it again on your own clip before anything is encoded. The aspect ratio calculator does the same arithmetic for a frame you type yourself, and the trimmer cuts the clip to length before you reframe it.
Frequently asked questions
What size should an Instagram Reel be?
1080 × 1920 pixels, which is 9:16 — the same shape as a phone screen held upright. That is the frame this page starts on. Instagram will accept other shapes and letterbox or crop them into the Reels player, but sending the exact frame is the only way to control which part of your picture survives rather than letting the platform decide.
Is the Instagram feed the same size as Reels?
No, and this is the single most common mistake. The feed's tallest supported shape is 4:5 — 1080 × 1350 — while Reels is 9:16 at 1080 × 1920. A video cut for Reels and posted to the feed loses the top and the bottom. Both frames are on the placement selector here, so you can export the same source twice with the crop box positioned differently for each.
Will this add a watermark or compress my video?
No watermark, ever. The reframe re-encodes because cropping and scaling cannot be done any other way, and it uses your device's own hardware video encoder at a high quality setting, so the loss is small. Nothing is uploaded — the file is read, reframed and written back inside this browser tab.
How do I stop Instagram cropping my video badly?
By cropping it yourself before you upload. When a video's shape does not match the placement, the platform crops from the centre, which is right only when your subject happens to be centred. Choosing the frame here and dragging the box over the part that matters means the decision has already been made by the time Instagram sees the file.
Can I keep the whole picture instead of cropping?
Yes — switch the framing to 'Fit with bars' and the entire picture is scaled down inside the target frame with black bars filling the rest. It is the honest choice when nothing can be cut, and the tool shows exactly how thick the bars will be before you run it. For Reels it is usually the wrong trade, because those bars are screen space in a full-screen format.