What gets cropped, before you post it
Instagram crops your carousel on the profile grid. TikTok draws its interface over the top of it. Drop a slide in and see both — nothing is uploaded.
Drag an image here, or . It never leaves your browser.
Placement
The tallest Instagram allows, and the most feed space you can take. The grid crops it to a square.
- Cropped from the profile grid
The three rules this comes down to
- 1Keep the headline out of the top and bottom tenthThat's the band Instagram takes for the grid crop. It's also, unhelpfully, where most people put the headline.
- 2Keep the bottom fifth of a TikTok slide clearThe caption, username and sound credit sit there. Text underneath them isn't smaller — it's gone.
- 3Don't crop one set of slides three waysExporting 4:5 and letting each platform squeeze it is how you end up with three mediocre posts. Generate each size properly.
The full dimensions, slide limits and aspect ratios for all three platforms are in carousel sizes for Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. If you'd rather not think about any of it, the free generator builds each platform at its own size rather than cropping one export three ways.
Questions
- What is a carousel safe zone?
- The part of a slide that survives every place the post gets shown. The image you upload isn't the image everyone sees: Instagram centre-crops a 4:5 carousel to a square on your profile grid, and TikTok draws its caption, username and action rail on top of the picture. The safe zone is what's left once both have taken their cut.
- How much does Instagram crop from a 4:5 carousel?
- Roughly the top and bottom tenth each, because a 1080 × 1350 image has to become a 1080 × 1080 square on the profile grid and it crops from the centre. Nothing is cropped in the feed itself — but the grid is how most people see your profile for the first time, so a headline sitting in the top eighth is invisible at exactly the wrong moment.
- What covers a TikTok photo post?
- Three things: the status bar and tabs across the top, the action rail down the right-hand side, and the username, caption and sound credit along the bottom. Together they take a meaningful share of a 1080 × 1920 frame, and the bottom band is the one that catches people out because that's where captions instinctively go.
- Should I just use 1:1 to be safe?
- Only if the grid matters more to you than the feed. A 4:5 post takes about a fifth more vertical space in the feed, which is real attention. The better answer is usually to keep 4:5 and design with the crop in mind — keep anything that must be read away from the top and bottom tenth.
- Do you upload my image?
- No. The file is read by your browser and drawn to a canvas locally. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and the tool works with no account.
Or skip the cropping problem entirely
SlideBuddy generates each platform at its own size, then publishes it — no exporting, no re-cropping.
Full features for 7 days, cancel any time before it ends. Card required to start the trial so posting can begin immediately — or take five carousels free on the no-card plan, for ever.