What Is a 1080x566 Instagram Landscape Post?
The 1080x566 pixel format represents Instagram's landscape (horizontal) image option for feed posts. With a 1.91:1 aspect ratio — the widest ratio Instagram supports — this format is ideal for panoramic photography, cinematic screenshots, banner-style graphics, and content originally created for landscape-first platforms like YouTube or blog headers. Instagram introduced landscape support to give creators more flexibility beyond the original square-only format. However, landscape images on Instagram come with a significant trade-off: they occupy less vertical space in the scrollable feed compared to square (1:1) or portrait (4:5) images. This means landscape posts receive less visual attention as users scroll through their feed, which is why many social media strategists recommend using them sparingly.
The Grid Crop Problem with Landscape Images
The most important technical consideration for Instagram landscape images is how they appear in the profile grid. Instagram's grid always displays posts as square thumbnails, and for landscape images, this means a significant center crop. A 1080x566 image will lose approximately 48% of its width when cropped to a square — everything outside the central 566x566 pixel area is hidden in the grid view. This creates a design challenge that developers building Instagram tools must address. Your image editor or post preview should show users both the full landscape rendering (as seen in the feed) and the center-cropped square rendering (as seen in the grid). Without this dual preview, users may publish landscape images where the most important visual elements are outside the grid crop zone, resulting in a confusing or unappealing profile grid. Using a 1080x566 UsefulPix placeholder during development lets you build and test this dual-preview functionality. You can overlay crop guidelines on the placeholder to clearly delineate which portion of the landscape image will be visible in the square grid thumbnail, helping users make informed composition decisions before posting.
When to Use Landscape vs. Square vs. Portrait on Instagram
Each Instagram aspect ratio serves a different purpose. Square (1080x1080) is the safest all-around choice with predictable rendering everywhere. Portrait (1080x1350, 4:5) takes up the most feed real estate and generally achieves the highest engagement. Landscape (1080x566) occupies the least space but is the right choice when the content genuinely demands a widescreen format. Landscape is most appropriate for content like panoramic travel photography, movie or TV screenshots, before-and-after comparison images placed side by side, and repurposed blog or website graphics that were originally designed in landscape. If the content works just as well cropped to a square, the square format will almost always perform better on Instagram. For developers building social media scheduling tools, consider implementing aspect ratio recommendations. When a user uploads a landscape image, your tool could suggest whether the content might perform better as a square crop. A UsefulPix placeholder at 1080x566 can serve as the default preview for landscape mode in your upload interface, with interactive crop handles that let users adjust to square or portrait if desired.
Technical Specs and API Considerations
Instagram's API requires that landscape images have an aspect ratio no wider than 1.91:1, which corresponds to a width-to-height ratio of roughly 1080x566. If you submit an image wider than this — say, a 21:9 ultrawide screenshot — Instagram's API will reject it or auto-crop it. Your upload validation should check the aspect ratio before sending the image to Instagram's servers. The minimum width for any Instagram image is 320 pixels, but images below 1080 pixels wide will be upscaled, introducing visible blurriness. Always resize to exactly 1080 pixels wide and let the height follow the desired aspect ratio. For the maximum landscape format, that means 1080x566 (some sources round to 1080x565 or 1080x567, but 566 is the most commonly accepted value). During development, use a 1080x566 placeholder to test your aspect ratio validation logic. Try submitting images at 1080x500 or 1080x400 to verify that your validation correctly rejects ratios wider than 1.91:1 and provides helpful error messages to users. This boundary testing is much easier with placeholder images that you can generate at arbitrary dimensions on demand.