You may have noticed your Instagram feed looking a little different than usual lately, and it’s not a bad thing! After years of standard square images and videos, Instagram opened up their platform to allow for portrait and landscape orientations. What?! We’re here with everything you need to know for this week’s Social Media Monday!

These new Instagram sizes are a huge deal for Instagram lovers and business builders everywhere! While the typical user might not be all that excited over image sizes, those of us trying to build our businesses know that this is major. It makes repurposing content a lot easier since you can skip the editing, cropping, and rotating to find the perfect 1:1 fit for your Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter image. The variety also helps to make your Instagram profile more interesting which gives you an edge over to other users that haven’t caught on yet!

The New Instagram Sizes

• Square
• Landscape
• Horizontal

Now, each of these comes with its own set of restraints, but we’ll break that down for you below.

Square

The standard image on Instagram hasn’t changed from its max display of 600×600 pixels, but Instagram does store a version as large as 1080×1080 pixels.  So, we recommend creating or using images that are at least 1080×1080 to give yourself the highest resolution to reuse on any of your other platforms. Plus, as screens become more advanced, you can help prevent your images from being too small with the next iOS update.

Landscape

For landscape images, Instagram stores a version of the image at 1080×607. While some users have claimed their images are being resized to 600×337, the maximum width seems to be 1080px and the maximum width is 600px.

Landscape videos follow the same trend which is similar to the 16:9 ratio that we see in on TV!

Horizontal

Vertical (a.k.a. portrait) images will bestored at 1080×1350, but be displayed at either 480×600 or 920×1200 for those with retina display.

Vertical videos, however, are just a little different. They are displayed at a maximum of 481×599.484, making this a complete nightmare for graphic designers (sorry!).

What Does This Mean for Instagram?

All in all, don’t expect a huge upheaval or too much excitement over the updates. There’s a good chance the square image will be more heavily used than any of the others. It is, after all, where the platform found its original footing!

You might start to see more landscape images because, after all, it is a mobile platform! People have a habit of holding their phone in landscape, and this will give their landscape-oriented media a more natural viewing experience that will cover more screen space to attract more attention.

Need a quick graphic to take with you? Grab one of our favorites below!