Instagram Photos No Longer Have to Be Square

What changed yesterday

Until this week, every photo on Instagram was square. A wide shot of a finished kitchen lost its ends, and a tall shot of a staircase lost its top or its bottom.

Yesterday, Thursday, Instagram announced that photos and videos can now keep a portrait or landscape shape. A new format button on the cropping screen switches between the square and the photo's own proportions.

There are limits. A post can be as wide as 1.91 to 1, a little under twice as wide as it is tall, or as tall as 4 to 5, a quarter taller than it is wide.

In the feed, followers now see the whole picture. On your profile page, every post still appears as a square cut from its centre.

What the square did to business photos

• Long products shrank to a thin strip across the middle.
• Rooms lost a wall, a window or the ceiling.
• Finished jobs lost the end that showed their size.
• White borders were added in a second app, so the whole photo fitted.
• Signs and lettering were trimmed at the edges.
• Before and after pairs were squeezed side by side into one square.

The fourth is the one to look at first. Borders were the usual workaround, and they shrank the photo inside a white box on a screen that was already small. They can stop today.

How each shape sits on a phone

Instagram is used almost entirely on phones, held upright. Each post fills the width of the screen, so its shape decides how much of the screen's height it takes.

A portrait post at the tallest allowed shape is a quarter taller than a square, so it holds the screen a little longer as someone scrolls past.

A landscape post at the widest shape is about half the height of a square. It arrives as a strip, with the subject smaller than it would have been in a square.

Wider is not bigger on a phone. Landscape suits the few subjects that genuinely need the width, and very little else.

The grid still shows squares

Tap through to your profile and nothing has changed. Every post appears as a square cut from the middle of the photo, so the grid stays tidy.

That grid is what people look at when they check your account before following. It works as a shop window, and it now shows a different picture from the feed.

A wide photo with its subject off to one side becomes a square of whatever sat in the middle: a patch of lawn, a blank wall, half a doorway.

So any photo posted in portrait or landscape has a second job. Its centre square has to make sense on its own.

Choosing one shape

The new freedom invites a different shape for every photo, decided at the moment of posting. That is the habit to avoid.

A business account works better with one standard shape, chosen once. The people taking photos on site know how to frame them, the feed looks deliberate, and the grid behaves predictably.

Square remains a perfectly good choice: what you frame is exactly what the grid shows. Portrait suits people, products standing upright, interiors and doorways, and gives each post more of the screen.

Landscape works best as the occasional exception, for the one subject that cannot be shown any other way.

A worked example

A tiny house builder works from a shop on a rural road, building small houses on trailers narrow enough to tow on the highway, and posts progress photos two or three times a week.

Its best photographs never fitted the square. A finished house on its trailer is long and low, so the crop cut off either the hitch or the far wall.

The interior shot that drew the most attention, a sleeping loft above the kitchen with a ladder between them, was tall. The square kept the loft or the kitchen, never both.

For two years someone added white borders with a second app so the whole house fitted. On a phone, the house became a narrow band inside a white frame.

After yesterday's announcement the owner chose portrait as the standard, framed with the ladder or the front door in the middle so the grid square still shows the subject. The borders stopped, and the old posts stay as they are.

The full-length side views went where width costs nothing: the gallery on the builder's own website, which the link in the profile now points to.

Leave the old posts alone

The tempting next step is to post the best old photos again, uncropped. It is usually a mistake.

Deleting the originals loses the likes and comments people left, and reposting fills followers' feeds with pictures they have already seen. Old squares can stay in the grid as a record of how the account began.

Tell whoever takes the photos

In most businesses the pictures come from several phones: the owner's, a site lead's, someone in the office. A standard only works if all of them know it.

One instruction covers it: hold the phone upright, put the work in the middle of the frame, and leave space above and below it. The same goes for video clips, which can now stay tall too.

Pin it wherever photos get posted from. A rule that lives only in the owner's head lasts until the first busy week.

The counter-case

Some accounts gain little from the change. Product shots set up against a plain background, logos, quotes and flat arrangements were often composed as squares from the start.

An account with a strong square look, built over years, may reasonably keep it. Consistency is the point, and square is consistent.

And a business that posts once a month has more to gain from posting regularly than from any choice of shape.

Choose one shape on purpose, frame the subject in the centre so the grid still works, and use it for every post.

This week

1. Scroll your last thirty posts for subjects cut off.
2. Stop adding white borders to wide photos.
3. Choose one shape as the account standard.
4. Frame the subject in the centre every time.
5. Tell everyone who posts which way to hold the phone.
6. Check your profile grid after each new post.
7. Leave old posts as they are.

Step four is the one that protects the account. The feed shows each photo whole for a moment, but the grid shows only its middle, permanently, to everyone deciding whether to follow you.

Where customers' own photos of your work end up is covered in the location tag customers use on Instagram.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.