Square, portrait, story, wide: fitting a photo to social media without cropping it

Why apps crop your photo

Social apps show photos in a few fixed shapes. When your photo's shape doesn't match, the app crops it, and the cut usually falls where you didn't want it: the top of a head, the edge of a group, the text on a poster. Phone photos are typically 4:3 (or 3:4 held upright), and none of the common feed shapes is 4:3.

The common shapes

• 1:1, square: the classic feed post and many profile photos.
• 4:5, portrait: the tallest shape most feeds show in full; it takes up more of the screen than a square.
• 9:16, full-screen vertical: stories, short videos and their covers.
• 16:9, wide: video thumbnails, link previews and banners.

Exact pixel sizes change as apps update, but these shapes have been stable for years. Matching the shape matters more than the exact pixel count: apps resize anyway, and what they can't fix is a mismatched shape.

! In full-screen stories, the app draws your name and profile picture at the top and reply buttons at the bottom. Keep faces and text away from roughly the top and bottom sixth of the frame, or they'll be covered.

Fit or fill?

There are two ways to make a photo match a frame:

• Fill: enlarge the photo until it covers the frame and crop what sticks out. Good for a single subject in the middle; you choose which part to keep.
• Fit: keep the whole photo and fill the empty space around it with a background. Good for group photos, screenshots, documents, art and anything where every edge matters.

For the background, a blurred copy of the photo itself looks natural and fills the frame softly. A color picked from the photo matches it without distracting. A solid white or black works for screenshots and products.

Fit a photo with MoaMoa

1. Open Fit a photo for social and choose your photos.
2. Pick a shape: Square post, Portrait post, Story, Wide or a custom size.
3. Choose Fit to keep the whole photo, then a background: Blurred photo, Color from the photo or Solid color. Or choose Fill and drag to choose the crop.
4. Save as JPEG for photos, or PNG for screenshots with text.

Every photo in a batch gets the same frame, so a set of posts looks consistent. Processing happens on your device, and location data is removed from the saved photos.

More ideas

To post two photos side by side as one image, such as a before and after, use Combine photos first and then fit the result. To add a caption on the image itself, Make a meme lets you place text anywhere on a photo.