
Square images are better, but 4:5 images are the best.

It not only gives you the most digital real estate to work with in your photo, but it also takes up the most size in the feed.ĭue to the nature of their aspect ratio in the portrait orientation of a phone, when your audience scrolls through their feeds, unfortunately the landscape images - the little images - get skipped over pretty fast. While Instagram supports every ratio between 1.91:1 and 4:5, there’s only really one crop size you should be uploading at - 4:5.Ĥ:5 turns out to be the largest pixel size you can upload.

The compression will dull it down when you upload it. If it looks like it’s almost too sharp, you’re golden. Once you’ve sharpened your shot, send it to your phone.
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And although you can do that by setting your “Output sharpening” to “Screen”, we can do better.Ĭheck out this article on how to sharpen images in Lightroom. That’s a long-winded way to say that you need to sharpen for a phone display.

How many pixels per inch does your phone pack into its display? How many dots per inch is your printer printing your image at? What material and size? What about the size of your display? How far are they standing away from the image? What size is it seen at? All of these variables and many more determine how good your image looks when someone is viewing it. This is because depending on what medium you’re viewing the image on, there are variables in the quality of your viewing experience. Typically, you’ll have different sharpening levels if you’re getting your image printed vs being viewed on a mobile device. Sharpness is usually perceived as detail, and a more detailed image looks better generally.Īs with all formats, whether it’s print or digital, you need to sharpen for your medium. This is actually the biggest deal when it comes to what looks like a high quality image. With that said, there are 6 dimensions to consider when exporting for Instagram. The best export settings for Instagram in Lightroom Alternatively, if you upload at 100%, you also compress at 100%. Therefore, if you’re uploading at 75% quality, then you’re compressing 75% quality. The actual quality of the algorithm is quite good - compressing file size considerably at little loss of quality - so it’ll be hard to tell, but there’s definitely compression there. Upload an image at 50% quality at less than 500kb and extract that image from the desktop version of Instagram (right click > inspect element on your image > expand the sibling DIV > right click to open your image in a new tab > save) and compare it to your original image. There’s too many variables, and therefore the most reasonable approach is to standardise all images, even if it ends up being parity or just a check. It needs to be that way because it doesn’t make logical sense to assume that the user’s compression is better than their own.
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Instagram is optimising for images to load as fast as they can for the best experience, so they try and reduce the file sizes of your images so there’s less to download and thus your feeds load quicker. The reason why they do this is the same reason why many websites squash images too (including this website you're reading this on!) - performance. Some other things we do know, though, is that Instagram also uses what’s called an image compression algorithm on all images that get uploaded to their servers.

