Social Resizers·4 min read

Instagram Grid Posts: Split One Photo Into Tiles

A grid post turns your profile into one large picture made of several separate posts. A carousel panorama does the same thing inside a single post, as people swipe. Both look striking when they line up and sloppy when they don't. This guide explains how the split works, which tile shape to pick now that the profile grid uses taller tiles, the posting order that trips everyone up, and how big the source photo needs to be.

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Two ways to split a photo for Instagram

Profile grid or carousel.

A profile grid spreads one image across several posts, three to a row, so the picture appears when someone visits your profile. Each tile is still its own post in followers' feeds, where it shows as a fragment.

A carousel panorama cuts a wide image into slides inside one post. In the feed, people swipe and the picture continues from slide to slide. Nothing changes on your profile except one new post. Choose the grid for a profile makeover or a launch, and the carousel when the picture should reach people in the feed.

Both approaches suit the same kinds of images: wide landscapes, product line-ups, event photos and simple graphics with a single strong subject. Busy photos with detail everywhere tend to fall apart when they are cut, because each tile looks like noise on its own.

Choosing a tile shape

The grid got taller.

Instagram's profile grid now shows tiles in a 3:4 portrait shape. A grid made of 1080x1440 tiles fills those cells exactly, so the picture joins up edge to edge. That is the default in Instagram Grid Maker.

4:5 tiles at 1080x1350 and square tiles at 1080x1080 still work, but the profile grid trims a little from their sides, which leaves small breaks in the joined picture. They make more sense for carousels, where each slide shows in full.

Splitting a photo, step by step

One upload, numbered tiles.

Upload a photo, choose Profile grid and the number of rows, from one row of three to five rows of fifteen, and pick the tile size. The tool crops the photo to the shape of the whole grid, then cuts it into equal tiles. Zoom and the horizontal and vertical sliders decide which part of the photo fills the grid.

For a 3 by 3 grid of 3:4 tiles, the whole picture is 3240x4320. A landscape photo will lose a lot of its width at that shape, so a 3 by 1 banner or a 3 by 2 grid often suits wide shots better. The preview shows the tiles with gaps, as they appear on a profile, with a posting number on each.

Posting order, the part everyone gets wrong

Last tile first.

New posts appear at the top left of a profile and push everything else along. So the tile that should end up at the bottom right has to be posted first, and the top-left tile last.

The grid maker handles this for you. Tiles are numbered in posting order on the preview and the files are named post-01-of-09, post-02-of-09 and so on, so you simply post them from 1 upward. Carousel slides are numbered left to right, slide-01 onward, in the order you add them to the post.

Post the whole set in one session, with nothing else in between
Check your current post count leaves full rows, or the picture will start mid-row
Pin posts carefully, since pinned posts sit at the top and can shift the grid

Keeping tiles sharp

Size the source for the grid.

Every tile is saved 1080 pixels wide, which is the width Instagram displays. That means the source photo should be at least as wide as the whole grid: about 3240 pixels for three tiles across. Smaller photos are enlarged and look soft, and the tool warns you when that happens.

JPG is the practical format, since Instagram recompresses every upload anyway. Keep faces and text away from the tile edges, where the thin gaps between posts fall, and remember that each tile will also be seen on its own in the feed.

Grid mistakes that break the picture

Easy to avoid.

Most broken grids come from one of these.

Posting the top-left tile first, which reverses the whole picture
Posting something else halfway through, shifting every tile one cell
Using square tiles on the 3:4 grid and wondering why the edges don't meet
Starting from a small phone crop, so a 3 by 3 grid comes out blurry
Putting a headline across a tile boundary, where the gap cuts through the letters

Tips and related tools

Prepare, split, post.

If the picture needs a single post for the feed as well, Instagram Image Resizer makes 1080x1350 and 1080x1440 versions of the same photo from one upload. For carousels of separate images rather than one panorama, resize each image to the same shape there so the slides match.

Plan the caption for each grid tile before you start posting. Followers see the tiles one at a time in their feeds, so a short caption that hints at the bigger picture, such as part 3 of 9 with a nudge to visit the profile, turns a fragment into a reason to click through.

Finally, keep the original photo and the ZIP together. If Instagram changes its grid shape again, you can split the same photo into new tiles in a minute instead of rebuilding the design.

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