The vertical format
Vertical full-screen content has become the dominant format on mobile: Instagram Stories and Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat and Facebook Stories all use a 9:16 frame. At 1080 × 1920 pixels the image matches a Full HD phone screen exactly, so the platform does not need to scale or crop it further. Uploading at this size avoids unexpected crops and the softening that comes from being upscaled.
Turning regular photos into Stories
Most photos are not 9:16. A typical 4:3 phone photo cropped to fill a Story loses more than half of its width, which works for portraits but not for group shots or landscapes. Here you have two options:
- Crop to fill keeps the central vertical slice of the photo; great for a single person, a tall building or a product.
- Fit and pad shrinks the whole photo to the frame’s width and centres it, filling the space above and below with a background colour. This is a classic Story layout, leaving room for text or stickers added in the app.
Safe zones
Platform interfaces cover parts of the screen. On Instagram Stories, the top area holds the progress bar and account name, and the bottom area holds the reply field. On Reels and TikTok, captions, buttons and the music label sit along the bottom and the right side. Keep faces and text inside the central area, roughly the middle 1080 × 1420 pixels, to be safe.
Batch preparation
Planning a series of Stories? Add all the photos at once. They are resized to the same 1080 × 1920 frame with identical settings, so the sequence looks consistent, and you can download the whole set as a ZIP to transfer to your phone.
How it works
Images are decoded on your device, rotated according to EXIF orientation, cropped or padded to 9:16, and resampled with the Lanczos3 filter for sharp results. Choose JPG as the output for the most predictable upload quality.
Related sizes: 1080 × 1350 for feed posts and 1920 × 1080 for horizontal video frames.