Speedy Square Crops for Instagram Carousel Posts

Zë Au Sol

— 1 min read
Speedy Square Crops for Instagram Carousel Posts

Posting to Instagram, more than any other social platform is an art unto itself. To start with, they only allow three aspect ratios in a single post:

  • 1:1
  • 4:5 (portrait)
  • 1.91:1 (landscape, very annoying!)

From a platform perspective, I understand the restriction, and from a photographer's perspective, it's gory-damn annoying, especially for details in landscape photos.

The workaround is a carousel post: a gallery of images. Due to the way Instagram lays the images out, there's no border, which when cropped correctly creates the illusion of a seamless scrolling vista:

One image split into two to populate a carousel post

This leads to the next problem: how does one quickly slice up an image into the requisite perfect pieces for Instagram? Imagemagick, of course! 

magick convert -crop "1:1" fileToBeCropped.jpg croppedFile$02d.jpg

The result? 1:1 squares based on the height of the image. NB: this is for Windows, I believe for macOS or Linux one uses ' instead of ".

Read more