When you upload an image to Instagram or other social media, they’re processed by the server, resized and sometimes cropped automatically, and we usually don’t have a lot of control over this.
This is called ‘image optimisation’ and is done to improve the display speeds of your images. Image optimisation reduces the size of the image both in resolution (the number of pixels wide and high) and also in terms of file-size.
Below are two images which both have a resolution of 1000×1000 pixels. On the left is a mobile phone image which has been compressed using the standard phone compression (saved as a JPG) and the image on the right has been further compressed (before also being saved as a JPG)
You might not able to notice a difference but the image on the left is 488kb whilst the photo on the right is only 25kb. When you loaded this page, both the images downloaded to your device. The right-hand image would have been nearly instant, whilst the left-hand image may have taken several seconds and used half a megabyte of data.
Reducing an image resolution and compressing it can often massively reduce the file size. It might not make a lot of difference on this web page, but for a social media platform which is managing thousands or millions of page views a day, it can make a huge difference both in money saved and user-experience
How to avoid your images being compressed too much by Instagram or other social media platforms
Answer: Crop and re-size your images yourself before you upload them
As you’ve seen, you don’t get a lot of control over the optimisation of your images when you upload them to social media sites, however, If you optimise the resolution of your image before it’s uploaded, you can certainly improve the automatic optimisation.
For example, here’s how to optimise your Instagram images before uploading (for free) using desktop:
2. Decide what resolution you would like (width x height in pixels):
- Instagram Post 1080px x 1080px resolution (1:1 aspect ratio)
- Instagram Profile Photo 360px x 360px resolution (1:1 aspect ratio)
- Instagram Landscape Photo 1080px X 566px resolution (1.91:1 aspect ratio)
- Instagram Portrait 1080px x 1350px resolution (4:5 aspect ratio)
More info here (opens in a new tab)
3. open your image in Photopea. Click on the file menu and select ‘open’ and upload a high-resolution picture
4. When your image has loaded click the ‘rectangle select’ tool (press M) then choose the ‘ratio’ option from the top bar. For a square image, the ratio is 1:1 as in the picture on the right.
For an Instagram Portrait where the aspect ratio is 4:5 (see above) you would put 4 and 5 in the two boxes respectively. Etc.
5. Draw the selection across the picture to create the cropping you would like to use. When you are happy with the selection, from the Image menu (top-left) choose ‘crop’
Your image is now the right aspect ratio but the wrong resolution
6. Choose the image size option from the image menu. in the pop-up box, change the image width to the correct width as specified above. The height should automatically change too.
For example, a square image (Instagram Post) is 1080 px x 1080 pixels (note: that’s a 1:1 aspect ratio and a 1080x1080px resolution)
7. You need to now save the image on your computer. From the File menu select ‘export as’ and choose JPG or PNG (Instagram only accepts images in JPG, JPEG, PNG, format and non-animated GIF files)
The quality slider dictates how much compression to apply. In other words, the higher the percentage, the better quality the image. Therefore you might consider changing this to 100%
You can now upload the cropped image to Instagram and it won’t be automatically compressed
