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- Instagram's grid is three by four. Anything wider gets shaved at the edges.
- Drop a photo in. It never leaves your browser - there's no upload and no account.
- The readout shows the source size, each slice's size, and which one you post first.
- Fill crops to three by four. If that cuts something you wanted, the crop position slider slides the window.
- Or switch to Fit. It keeps the whole frame and adds bars in a colour you choose.
- Hit Slice into nine. Every tile comes out at ten eighty by fourteen forty.
- Those numbers are posting order. Instagram stacks newest first, so post one is the bottom-right corner.
- Take all nine as a zip, save them straight to your phone, or grab them one at a time.
- Post them from the Instagram app, in order, with nothing in between. After that, add posts in threes.
- Free, browser-only, and on the bench now.
The order is backwards, and that is the whole trick
Instagram builds your profile grid newest-first. The post you make right now goes top left and shoves everything else along. So a mural has to be posted in reverse: the bottom-right corner goes up first, and thetop-left corner goes up last. Get that backwards and you end up with a photo that reads upside down and inside out, which is the single most common way a hand-cut grid fails.
That is why the files come out named post-1.jpg throughpost-9.jpg in posting order rather than reading order, and why every cell in the preview carries its number. Work through them in order and the mural lands the right way up. Do not post anything else in between.
The panorama is the same trick, one row deep
Switch the layout to 1 × 3 panorama and you get three slices instead of nine. They land side by side in a single row of your profile and read as one wide photograph — the cheapest way to make a grid look designed, and it costs three posts instead of nine. Same rule about order: post-1 is the right-hand end, post-3 is the left.
The shape to know is 9:4. Three 3:4 posts in a row make a strip 2.25 times wider than it is tall, so a full-size panorama here is 3240 × 1440. That is wider than a 3:2 camera frame and far wider than 4:3, which means Fill will take a deep bite out of the top and bottom — use the crop position slider, or feed it an actual stitched panorama, which is usually much wider than 9:4 and only loses a little off the ends.
Why 3:4 and not the square you remember
The profile grid stopped being square in 2025. Every tile is now displayed at 3:4 with a centre crop, and Instagram added native 3:4 uploads to match. That combination is what makes the mural line up: cut nine 3:4 tiles, post them as 3:4, and each one fills its slot instead of being shaved to fit.
The trap is 4:5. It is still the number most guides quote, it is still a valid post size, and it is wrong for a mural — a 4:5 tile is wider than the 3:4 slot it lands in, so the grid shaves about 6% off both sides of all nine slices and your seams stop lining up. This tool cuts to 3:4 only. Each slice leaves here at 1080 × 1440, which means the mural you feed it wants to be at least 3240 × 4320 (or 3240 × 1440 for a panorama) —the same resolution arithmetic that decides how big you can print.
Life after the mural
A grid mural is a living layout, not a finished print. The tenth post you make shoves every tile one cell to the right and the whole thing shears. Post in multiples of three and each full row pushes the mural down intact. If it does go wrong, Instagram's Reorder Grid — press and hold any post on your profile, in the app — lets you drag tiles back into place without deleting anything.
Two smaller things worth knowing: a pinned post occupies a grid slot and will displace your mural, and Instagram re-encodes everything you post, so feed it sRGB rather than a wide-gamut export if you care about the colour surviving.
Questions from the bench
Which slice do I post first?
post-1.jpg — the bottom-right corner of your photo. Instagram stacks the newest post at the top left, so the grid fills in backwards. Work up through post-2, post-3 and so on; post-9.jpg, the top-left corner, is the last one you post. A panorama works the same way: post-1 is the right-hand end. The file names are already in posting order, so you never have to think about it.
How do I split a panorama across three Instagram posts?
Switch the Layout control to 1 × 3 panorama and you get three slices instead of nine. They sit side by side in one row of your profile grid and read as a single wide image. Each slice is still a full 1080 × 1440 3:4 post, so the strip you are cutting up is 9:4 (3240 × 1440 at full size) — wider than most panoramas are tall, which is why the crop position slider matters more here. Post them right to left, three in a row, nothing in between.
Why are the tiles 3:4 and not square or 4:5?
Because that is what the profile grid is now. Instagram moved the grid off squares in 2025, and every tile is displayed at 3:4 with a centre crop — measured at 311 × 414 on desktop and 124 × 165 on a phone. A 4:5 tile is wider than the tile it lands in, so the grid shaves roughly 6% off both sides of every slice and your mural gets nine seams. Instagram has accepted 3:4 uploads since May 2025, so a 3:4 slice fits its slot exactly. Each slice comes out at 1080 × 1440. Post them from the phone app — some upload paths still clamp to 4:5.
Should I schedule these through Later, Planoly or Buffer?
Post them from the Instagram app. Native 3:4 support is an app feature, and some scheduling tools still clamp images to the older 4:5 maximum on the way through. If that happens your tiles get cropped once on the way in and again by the grid, which is the one thing this tool exists to prevent. If you must schedule, test with a single slice on a spare account first.
What happens when I post something else afterwards?
The mural shifts one cell and breaks. A grid only holds still if you add posts in multiples of three — a full new row pushes the whole mural down intact. If you post one or two, the tiles slide diagonally. Two things save you: keep the mural to the bottom of your grid and add rows above it, or use Instagram’s Reorder Grid (press and hold a post on your profile — it arrived in June 2026, and it is app-only) to drag things back into place without reposting.
My photo is not 3:4 — what gets cut?
Whatever falls outside the 3:4 window, and the preview shows you exactly what that is before you slice anything. Fill crops to 3:4 and gives you a slider to choose which part of the frame survives. Fit keeps the entire photo and adds bars in a colour you pick, which is also how the bordered-mural look is made. A 3:2 frame out of the camera loses a lot to a 3:4 crop, so it is usually worth composing for this deliberately.
Why does it warn me that the slices will be soft?
Each slice is one ninth of your photo, so the mural needs to be 3240 pixels wide and 4320 tall for every tile to reach Instagram’s full 1080 × 1440. Below that we export at the real size rather than faking pixels you never had — Instagram will upscale it and the grid will look slightly soft. Any modern camera file clears this easily; a phone screenshot or a web-sized JPEG will not.
Does my photo get sent to a server?
No. The slicing happens in this tab using your own browser’s canvas — there is no upload, no account and no queue. That also means the re-encode strips EXIF and GPS data from the slices, which is good for privacy; be aware it strips embedded copyright fields too, though Instagram removes those regardless.