How to make an Instagram collage
By The CollageCreator team · Published · Last reviewed
Pick the placement before the layout
A feed post and a story are different shapes with different constraints, and a collage that works as one rarely works as the other. 4:5 gives a tall rectangle with no interface over it; 9:16 gives a much taller one with roughly 560 pixels obscured. The arrangements that suit them genuinely differ, which is why it is worth deciding first.
If you want both, make the collage once and switch the canvas, so the arrangement is re-solved for the second shape rather than the first one being scaled into it.
The profile grid crop
This is the one that surprises people. A 4:5 feed post is shown in full in the feed, but the profile grid crops it to 3:4 — losing about 90 pixels from the top and 90 from the bottom. A title along the top edge is there when the post is new and gone when someone visits your profile.
The fix is to keep anything that must be visible in both places inside the middle 3:4 of the canvas. Photos can run to the edges; text and faces should not.
Story safe areas
A story is 1080 × 1920 and about 560 pixels of it are covered — roughly 250 at the top by the profile row and close button, and 310 at the bottom by the reply bar. That leaves about 1360 pixels of usable height, and a collage laid out edge to edge loses a row at each end.
Photographs can extend behind both bands, which usually looks better than a hard stop. Text should not.
Getting through the re-encode
Instagram downsamples anything wider than 1080 pixels and re-encodes everything. That means two things: exporting wider than 1080 achieves nothing except letting their resizer do the work, and exporting at low quality compounds their compression with yours.
Export at exactly the target pixel size, as JPG at quality 90 or above. That is the setting that survives their re-encoding with the fewest visible artefacts, particularly along the gutters between cells, where compression noise shows most.
How many photos
Six to nine for a feed post, three to six for a story. Beyond that, cells get smaller than a face on a phone screen and the collage becomes a texture rather than a set of photographs.
For a bigger set, a carousel of two or three collages reads far better than one crowded image — and all slides should share one ratio, or Instagram crops the odd one out.