How to Post on Instagram: Feed, Carousel, Reel and Story

Posting takes five taps. Choosing which of the four formats to use is the decision that decides who sees it.

Updated 2026-10-03

How do you post on Instagram from your phone?

The flow is the same for every format until the last screen:

• Tap Create, the plus icon at the top, or swipe right from anywhere in your Feed.
• Choose Post, Reel or Story at the bottom of the camera screen.
• Pick a photo or video from your library, or take one.
• Crop and apply a filter or edits, then tap Next.
• Write a caption, tag people, add a location, alt text or music, and choose who can see it if you use a Close Friends audience.
• Tap Share.

Posting a Story instead

Choose Story on the camera screen, add stickers or text, then tap Your story to share it with everyone who can see your Stories, or Close Friends to share it with that list only. A Story stays up for 24 hours, and how long Instagram Stories last covers highlights and what happens after that.

Posting a Reel

Choose Reel, record or upload, add audio and text, then tap Next and Share. Reels can be up to 3 minutes long as of October 2026; how long a Reel can be explains what changes past that limit.

How do you post multiple photos in one Instagram post?

Make a carousel. After tapping Create and Post, tap Select multiple and choose up to 20 photos and videos. Instagram's Help Center notes three rules worth knowing before you start:

• The orientation you pick, square, portrait or landscape, applies to every item in the post. You can't mix them.
• You can reorder items by pressing and dragging, and remove one by dragging it to the trash before you share.
• You can write one caption for the whole post, or a separate caption for each photo or video.

How a carousel shows up

In the Feed, people see the first item with dots underneath and swipe for the rest. On your grid, the first item carries a small stacked-squares icon. Likes and comments apply to the whole post, not to individual slides, and videos inside a carousel are not treated as Reels and don't appear in your Reels tab. Stories have no carousel: to add multiple photos to an Instagram story, each one becomes its own frame or goes into a Layout collage.

How do you post on Instagram from a computer?

Instagram.com supports posting directly. According to Instagram's Help Center for desktop:

1. Click Create in the menu on the left.

2. Click Post, then Select from computer, or drag a file into the window. Supported photo formats are JPG, PNG and HEIC/HEIF.

3. Choose the crop and click Next.

4. Use Filters or Adjustments to edit, then click Next.

5. Write a caption, add a location, open Accessibility to write alt text, or open Advanced settings to turn off commenting.

6. Click Share.

The desktop flow handles photos, videos and carousels. For Stories and the full set of Reels editing tools, the phone app is the place the Help Center documents.

What is the best size for an Instagram post?

A photo 1080 pixels wide, with an aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 3:4. Instagram's Help Center explains the rule: photos between 320 and 1080 pixels wide keep their original resolution as long as the ratio sits in that range, which means heights from 566 to 1440 pixels at 1080 wide. Anything outside the range is cropped to fit, smaller images are enlarged to 320 pixels wide and larger ones are reduced to 1080.

In practice that gives three safe sizes:

• Portrait 3:4, 1080 x 1440 pixels, the tallest a feed photo can be and the shape of the profile grid preview.
• Square 1:1, 1080 x 1080 pixels.
• Landscape 1.91:1, 1080 x 566 pixels, which shows smallest in the Feed.

Reels and Stories

Both are full-screen vertical formats, so shoot or export them at 9:16, 1080 x 1920 pixels, and keep text away from the very top and bottom, where the app's buttons and captions sit.

Should you post a Reel or a photo?

Post a Reel when the goal is to reach people who don't know you yet, and a photo or carousel when the goal is to keep the audience you have engaged. That's the practical reading of how the formats are distributed: Reels have a whole tab built around recommendations, while feed posts are shown mainly to followers, with some appearing in Explore or as suggested posts.

Carousels sit in between. They're feed posts, but people who swipe through them spend longer on the post, and a carousel that teaches something step by step is often saved and shared, which is how feed posts travel beyond followers.

If reach is falling and you can't tell which half of your audience is missing, how to increase reach on Instagram splits it into followers and non-followers and treats each separately.

Can you schedule a post on Instagram?

Yes, from the app, if your account is public. Instagram's Help Center, as of October 2026, says you can schedule up to 25 posts a day, up to 30 days in advance, for photos, carousels and Reels:

1. Create the post or Reel as usual and tap Next.

2. Tap More options.

3. Turn on Schedule this post, or Schedule this reel, and pick a date and time.

4. Tap Done, go back, and tap Schedule.

Scheduled content keeps the privacy and audience settings it had when you scheduled it. You can't schedule posts that use product tags, collaborators, paid partnership labels or fundraisers. To change or cancel one, open your profile menu and look under Scheduled content, where each item has options to delete, edit, reschedule or share now.

Can you edit an Instagram post after publishing?

Partly. Tap the three dots above the post and choose Edit. You can change the caption, the location, the people tagged and the alt text; how to turn off location on Instagram covers removing a place tag after the fact. For a carousel, you can also reorder the photos and videos or remove some of them.

What you can't do is swap the photo or video itself, or add new items to a carousel after it's shared. If the image is wrong, the only fix is to delete the post and publish it again, which starts its likes and comments from zero. That's a good reason to check the crop before tapping Share.

If a post is worth keeping at the top of your profile, how to pin a post on Instagram shows how to fix up to three in place. And if the Share button fails or Instagram says try again later, that's a separate problem covered in why can't I post on Instagram.

A new post's first hour is when its like count is lowest and most visible. Some accounts add Instagram likes to a new post for that reason; it changes the number people read, not the distribution. The rest of the network's services and guides are on the Instagram page.

Questions people ask about posting on Instagram