Split a photo into an Instagram grid

The grid stopped being square in 2025

This is the thing most grid splitters still get wrong. Until January 2025 an Instagram profile showed every post as a 1:1 square thumbnail, so a nine-grid meant cutting your image into nine squares. Then Instagram switched the profile grid to a3:4 portrait cell — roughly 1013×1350 — because most of what people post is vertical and square previews were cropping it badly.

The consequence for mosaics is blunt: square tiles no longer tile. Upload nine 1080×1080 pieces today and the grid crops each one to 3:4 independently, so every seam shifts and the picture stops joining up. Thousands of carefully built grids broke overnight when the change landed, and a lot of tools have never been updated.

So the default here is a 3:4 cell, which is the shape the grid draws. The square option is still there, because it is right for an older archived grid, for a mosaic you are building somewhere other than Instagram, and for anyone who has decided they would rather have square feed posts and accept the grid's crop.

Post them backwards

A profile grid fills from the top-left with your newest post. The piece that belongs in the top-left corner is therefore the last one you upload, and the bottom-right piece goes up first. Reversing this is the single most common way a nine-grid comes out mirrored.

Rather than leave you to work that out, every piece is numbered by posting order — on the preview, on the result cards, and in the filenames, which are zero-padded so a file manager sorts them correctly. Post number 1, then 2, and so on. Wait for each to finish uploading before starting the next; posting several in quick succession is how two of them land out of order.

Carousels work the opposite way. Slides are swiped in upload order, so for a carousel the numbers just run left to right, and you select all of them in one post.

How big does the original need to be?

Multiply the tile size by the grid. A 3×3 grid of 1080×1440 tiles wants a source of at least 3240×4320. That is about 14 megapixels in a very tall shape, which most single phone photos are not — a 12MP iPhone photo is 4032×3024, wide rather than tall, so it will be cropped hard on the sides and then enlarged.

The tool tells you the factor when that happens, and it is worth listening to here more than anywhere else: nine enlarged tiles look considerably worse than one enlarged image, because the softness is repeated along every seam where the eye is already looking. If you are building a grid deliberately, start from something tall — a panorama shot vertically, a poster export, or a canvas you composed at the full size.

Grid or carousel?

A grid is permanent decoration for your profile. It costs you three, six or nine posts, every one of which appears separately in other people's feeds as a fragment that makes no sense on its own. That is the real price, and it is why grids suit announcements, launches and portfolio headers rather than everyday posting.

A carousel costs one post and reads as intended in the feed: the viewer swipes and the image continues. If what you have is a wide panorama, this is almost always the better choice.

Questions

Can I rearrange my grid afterwards instead?

Instagram shipped grid reordering globally in 2026, so posts can be dragged into position after the fact. It is a genuine safety net if you post a piece out of order — but it moves whole posts, so it cannot fix a set of tiles cut to the wrong shape.

What happens when I post something new?

Everything shifts by one and the mosaic breaks. This is unavoidable with a grid: the next ordinary post lands top-left and pushes every tile along. Plan for the grid to be the last thing you post for a while, or to be reordered afterwards.

Which format should I choose?

JPG for photographs, which is what Instagram re-encodes to anyway. PNG only if the image is flat colour, a logo or lettering, where JPG artefacts show up along hard edges. Quality 0.9 is already past the point where you would see the difference after Instagram's own compression.

Does this strip my photo's metadata?

Yes. Each piece is re-encoded from decoded pixels, so EXIF — camera model, capture time, GPS coordinates — does not survive into the output.

Can I use this for a Threads or Facebook grid?

The cutting is the same; only the cell shape differs. Neither shows a mosaic profile grid the way Instagram does, so in practice the carousel layouts are the useful ones there.

My pieces are too big to upload comfortably.

Lower the quality slider first. If you need a specific file size, thecompress-to-a-target-size tooltakes each piece down to an exact limit, andthe resizer handles the case where you want a different pixel size entirely.