Instagram Reels Dimensions — 1080x1920, Safe Zone & Cover Size

The Reels Safe Zone, to Scale

Every guide repeats Meta’s three percentages. Almost none of them show what the percentages leave behind. Applied to a 1080x1920 frame, 14% off the top, 35% off the bottom, and 6% off each side reduce your usable area to 950x979px. Design full-bleed, but put every word inside the green box.

• The bottom is the trap: at 672px, the bottom band is more than a third of the frame. A caption placed “near the bottom” in your editor lands squarely behind Instagram’s own caption.
• Full-bleed background, centred text: the video should still fill all 1080x1920. Only the readable elements need to respect the safe zone.
• Stickers and captions move things: auto-captions and interactive stickers are drawn after upload, and they stack upward from the bottom. Leave slack if you plan to add them in-app.
• The right edge is a rail, not a margin: like, comment, share, and the audio disc run up the right side. 6% is the minimum; more is safer if your text is right-aligned.

Reels Cover Image

The cover is one image doing two jobs at two different aspect ratios, and that is the whole problem. Design it at 1080x1920, the same 9:16 canvas as the video — that is what plays full-screen in the Reels feed. But on your profile grid, Instagram crops that cover to a 3:4 tile.

• Design at 1080x1920: the cover is either a frame lifted from your video or an image you upload. Either way it is a 9:16 asset.
• Survive the 3:4 grid crop: the profile grid tile is taller than it is wide, but nowhere near 9:16. It takes a centre slice, so a title sitting low in the frame vanishes from your grid.
• Instagram lets you reposition the grid crop: when you set a cover, you can drag the grid thumbnail independently of the full-screen cover. Use it — the default centre crop is rarely the right one.
• Put the hook in the middle: the intersection of the 9:16 safe zone and the 3:4 centre crop is the only region that reads in both places.
• Don’t upload a small cover: a cover exported at grid-thumbnail size is upscaled for the full-screen view and looks soft. Always export the full 1080x1920.

How to Resize an Existing Video for Reels

If your footage is 16:9 — a YouTube video, a screen recording, anything filmed landscape — you have exactly two honest options: crop to 9:16 and lose the sides, or pad to 9:16 and fill the gap. Uploading the 16:9 file unchanged gets you black bars and a Reel that occupies a third of the screen.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=ih*9/16:ih,scale=1080:1920:flags=lanczos" \
  -c:a copy reel.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex \
  "[0:v]scale=1080:1920:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1080:1920,boxblur=40:1[bg]; \
   [0:v]scale=1080:-2[fg];[bg][fg]overlay=(W-w)/2:(H-h)/2" \
  -c:a copy reel.mp4

For the cover— a still image — you don’t need any of that. Use the resizer above:

1. Drop your cover image into the tool above (Instagram is preselected).
2. Choose the Story / Reel preset — that’s 1080x1920.
3. Drag the image inside the frame so your subject sits in the centre safe zone.
4. Click Download to save a 1080x1920 file, ready to set as your cover.

Everything runs in your browser — the image is never uploaded to a server.

Frequently Asked Questions