How to Post your Professional Photos to Instagram

Whether your Instagram account is for yourself as an individual, your brand, or even your pet, it’s important to know how to post the photos you’ve paid a professional photographer to take for you. Hell, even if they’re not professional photos, being sure to post with the content in mind is very important. You don’t want to cut off your feet or the top of your head just because you didn’t know how to prevent it from happening!

Why Should You Care?

If you’re posting on social media, there is a purpose to that post. Whether you’re trying to convert sales from followers, show off an outfit, or just portray a visually appealing lifestyle, the way your photo looks is what compels other users to engage with your posts and follow you to see more in the future.

On another note; As a professional photographer, I put a lot of thought into the perspectives, angles, editing, and final crop of every image I deliver. Even if your body, product, building, or whatever I shot technically fits into a square post, there was a purpose behind the way the original was cropped. Photographers shoot content to be visually appealing. We’re nerds about color, the rule of thirds, negative space, all the stuff you vaguely remember from back in art class. People don’t tend to notice why they love a picture, but they know it when they see it. Changing a professional photo on social media takes away all the nerdy details of why the photo was good in the first place.

Instagram’s Crop Allowances

By default, Instagram’s post creation screen will only show you a 1 x 1 square preview of the image or video you’re trying to post. By clicking the icon on the lower left of that preview, it will zoom out to Instagram’s maximum allowed dimensions for the type of content you’re sharing.

If you’re posting vertical content, the maximum aspect ratio Instagram allows is 4 x 5. This means a photo straight out of your phone or camera won’t fully fit in an Instagram feed post unless you add negative space around it. If you’re posting horizontal content, you’ll be given a maximum of 1.91 x 1 which is usually enough to show every pixel of a normal photo or video in landscape orientation.

1.91 x 1 (Landscape)

4 x 5 (Portrait)

Image Carousels

If you plan to use more than one photo on the same post, the above step becomes a little trickier to get right. For some reason, once you’ve begun the “multiple photos on a post” process (tapping the stacked square icon to the right side of “Recents” below the image preview), Instagram removes the icon at the lower left of the preview that allows you to change the post’s aspect ratio. You have to be sure to select your aspect ratio BEFORE selecting multiple photos.

This goes for both vertical and horizontal crops and I can’t for the life of me figure out why Instagram doesn’t allow users to change this once a carousel has been selected. This user interface choice leads to users believing that they are forced to post square images when posting carousels.

Editing Your Photos

In a word, DON’T.

If you hired a professional photographer, they have the eye (and the software) to make sure your photos look as good as possible. If there’s something about your photo(s) you’d like changed, ask the photographer! I promise that you won’t offend them and they’ll be happy to change a little bit about the color, contrast, or brightness to make you happier with the end result.

Slapping an Instagram filter on a professional photo just makes it look bad. Plain and simple. The filters were designed to “enhance” phone photos and have been around since before you could even post photos from other cameras on the platform. On top of this, it’s also wildly disrespectful to the photographer you hired, and depending on who that photographer is, you may even be in breach of your contract by further editing their work.

Please save your photographer those tense conversations in which we have to DM or email a client to take a photo down and repost it properly. Trust the process and the product and speak up beforehand if you’d like any changes made.

Thank you.

Signed, Every photographer.

“The single most important thing you can do is to shift your internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand." Everything else follows from that.

- Douglas Stone