The bit everyone gets wrong: the order
Cutting the picture up is the easy half. The half that ruins grids is posting order, and it catches almost everyone the first time.
Instagram puts your newest post in the top-left slot and pushes everything else right and down. So if you post your tiles in reading order — top-left first — the finished grid comes out mirrored and scrambled, because the tile you meant for the top-left ends up in the bottom-right. You have to post backwards: bottom-right tile first, top-left tile last.
Rather than ask you to work that out, the files are numbered in posting order. Upload file 1, then 2, then 3, and the picture builds itself correctly. Each tile also shows its number on screen, so you can see which slot it belongs to. If you are making a carousel instead, switch the numbering setting — a carousel keeps the order you add slides in, so there reading order is right.
Grid or carousel: two different formats
| Profile grid | Carousel | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical split | 3×3, or 3 wide by several rows | 1×2 or 1×3 |
| Posting order | Reverse — last tile first | Reading order |
| Seen as | Nine separate posts | One swipeable post |
| Gaps between tiles | Yes, thin gutters | None while swiping |
| Survives new posts | No — shifts as you post again | Yes |
That last row is worth thinking about before you commit to a profile grid. Every future post pushes the whole mosaic one slot along, so the picture holds together only until you post something else, unless you keep posting in multiples of three. A carousel has no such problem, which is why panoramas are usually better as carousels and grids are better for a deliberate, static profile design.
Start large, because the tiles get small
Each tile is a fraction of the original. A 3×3 split takes a ninth of the width and a ninth of the height, so a 1080-pixel image gives you 360-pixel tiles — fine as thumbnails, soft the moment someone taps one open. Around 3000 pixels on the long side is a comfortable starting point for a 3×3, giving tiles of roughly 1000 pixels.
Shape matters too. Tiles inherit the proportions of whatever you feed in, so a 3×3 split of a landscape photo produces nine wide rectangles, and Instagram will crop them to squares itself — badly, from the centre. If you want square tiles, crop to a square first.
The thin gutters between profile thumbnails cannot be removed by any splitter, so lines that run across tile boundaries will visibly break. Designs where each tile reads as its own panel — bold shapes, big type, a single subject per tile — hold up much better than fine detail spanning the joins.
Any grid, not just 3×3
Rows and columns go up to ten each. A 1×3 strip is the standard carousel panorama. A 3×3 is the classic profile block. Three columns by six or nine rows makes a mural that fills the visible part of a profile. The preview draws the cut lines over your image before anything is generated, so you can see where the splits land rather than discovering it after the fact.
Nothing leaves your device
The image is decoded and cut in your browser, and the tiles are built there too. No upload, no queue, no file size limit beyond your device's memory, and nothing kept once you close the tab. Download tiles one at a time by clicking them, or take the whole set as a ZIP with the files already named in posting order.