Everyone overthinks instagram reel dimensions. 1080 by 1920. Nine sixteen. Vertical. That's the whole cheat sheet, and it fits on a sticky note. The stuff around the numbers is where people actually mess up.
The cover, for one. The instagram reels cover photo size is the same 1080 by 1920, and you should set it yourself, because if you don't, Instagram grabs a random frame. Always the worst one. Mid-blink, weird crop, you know exactly which one. Keep the important bits centered too, because the profile grid crops covers down to a squarish view that's way more aggressive than it looks. I've had covers that were perfect full-screen turn into a forehead in the grid.
Then the safe zones. The bottom of a Reel is buried under the caption and buttons, the top under the interface chrome. Keep text and faces out of the outer 15 percent on every side. Your video can be technically flawless and still look broken if the punchline is sitting under the like button. Half the Reels I see have this problem. Check on a real phone, not your editing monitor. Monitors lie about this.
Most people do cover resizing on a laptop, fine, but if you live on your phone a social media image resizer app iOS Android style does it from the couch. Open the frame, crop 9:16, export. A mobile app to resize photos for every platform also handles grid posts and story stills in the same sitting, which saves more time than you'd think if you batch content.
File specs are forgiving: MP4, sensible bitrate, Instagram handles the rest. Length caps keep creeping up, so check the current one before storyboarding a three-minute epic. And the quiet part: shorter usually wins. Completion rate beats duration. Watch your own retention graph once and the whole debate ends.
We track the current numbers, cover sizes, and length limits at easyimagevideo.com, updated as the platform moves things around. And if you'd rather not think about any of this, send us your video and we'll return it correctly sized and formatted for every platform.