Instagram Reel Cover size: 1080 x 1920 pixels.

A Reel cover is a still image on the same 9:16 canvas as the video, 1080 by 1920 pixels, either picked from a frame or uploaded from the camera roll when you publish. It then appears in three shapes: full height in the Reels player, a 3:4 tile in the profile grid, and a centred square on some explore and recommendation surfaces.

Design for the tightest crop first. The 3:4 tile keeps the full width and the middle 1440 pixels of height; the square keeps only the middle 1080. A title that lives between roughly 600 and 1300 pixels down the canvas survives all three. On top of that, the player draws the caption and audio strip across the bottom and the button column down the right, so a title pushed low or hard right is covered even where it is not cropped.

The frequent mistake is uploading a 1080 by 1350 feed image as the cover. Instagram scales it to fill 9:16 and the title drifts out of the grid crop. Build the cover at full height, or use our Reel cover safe zone checker to slide an existing image until the title lands inside every overlay. Instagram's Reels help page could not be fetched when this entry was checked, so the crop behaviour described here comes from the app itself.