Working Google reviews: the loop that lifts
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Method · Instagram post size for restaurants
Instagram post size for a restaurant: the dish, the room and the daily special
Your plate deserves the full screen. Set one size once, and every photo lands the way you shot it.
the 4:5 portrait size that gives a restaurant photo the most screen in the Instagram feed
The setup
The Instagram post size that shows a restaurant photo largest in the feed is 4:5 portrait, 1080 × 1350 pixels; stories run 9:16 at 1080 × 1920, and the profile grid now crops every thumbnail to a tall 3:4. This guide gives you one size per kind of photo you actually take, the dish, the room, the team, the daily special, so you set your phone once and never drag a crop box again, whether you shoot every visual yourself or let an Instagram post generator frame them for you.
Symptoms
You might recognise these signs.
- Your dining-room photos come from the website in landscape and show up in the feed as a thin strip between two blocks of white.
- The plate looks great in the feed and loses its edges on your profile grid, so the grid reads like a random collage.
- You photograph the printed menu or the chalkboard, and nobody can read it on a phone.
- Every carousel mixes a square, a portrait and a wide shot, and Instagram crops two of the three.
- You spend ten minutes per post dragging the crop box instead of plating the next service.
Tired of photos that shrink in the feed?
Let ReadyToPost frame every dish and every table for Instagram, then fill the week while you run the service.
Frame my next postMethod
Step by step.
Set 4:5 as the house size for feed photos
Pick one size for everything that goes in the feed: 4:5 portrait, 1080 × 1350 pixels. It takes a quarter more height than a square (1080 × 1080) and more than twice the height of a landscape shot (1080 × 566), which is the difference between a plate someone stops on and a plate someone scrolls past. Instagram also accepts 3:4 (1080 × 1440), the exact shape of the new profile grid; use it if a tidy grid matters more to you than compatibility with the tools and templates that still default to 4:5. Either way, decide once, write it on the kitchen whiteboard, and stop asking the question.
If you keep 4:5, picture a slightly narrower 3:4 window in the center of the frame: that is what the grid shows. Nothing important goes in the outer strips.
Give each kind of restaurant photo its size
A restaurant shoots four things, and each has a natural frame. The dish: 4:5, from above or at a low angle, plate centered. The room or the terrace: 4:5 still, but step back and shoot vertical, so the depth of the room reads instead of a wide, flat strip. The team: 4:5, one or two people, faces in the middle third. The daily special or the one-night dish: a 9:16 story at 1080 × 1920, because it lives for a day, exactly like the short campaign it announces. What you never shoot as a photo is the paper menu; you shoot the dish it describes and let the caption name it.
Decide which of the four you post most, and make that the photo you take at every service, even when you skip the others.
Shoot with the crop already in mind
Most phones shoot 4:3 by default, which becomes 3:4 the moment you hold the phone upright. Hold it vertical, turn on the camera grid, and leave a margin around the plate on all four sides: the crop to 4:5, or to the grid's 3:4, takes a sliver off the edges, never the center. For the dining room, stand at the entrance and shoot toward the back wall, phone upright, so the tables lead the eye into the room. Shoot in the light you actually serve in; a photo of your room that looks like your room is what makes a guest feel the welcome matched the picture.
Take the vertical shot first, then the wide one if you want it for the website. Not the other way around.
Export at 1080 wide once, then stop re-cropping
Instagram compresses whatever you upload, so give it a clean file: 1080 pixels wide, JPEG at high quality, sRGB. Do not upscale a 600-pixel photo pulled from a booking platform or an old listing; it comes out soft and blotchy. Batch the week's photos to the same size in one go rather than one by one on publish night, and keep every slide of a carousel at the ratio of the first slide, because Instagram applies that one to all of them. If your visuals are generated rather than shot, an AI visual generator built for social formats produces them in the Instagram frame from the start, and the sizing step disappears.
Name the exported files by service and day (tue-lunch-dish, fri-dinner-room). It makes the next step almost automatic.
Put the sizes into a weekly routine
A size only helps if it is used every week. Set a small, repeatable rhythm: one 4:5 feed photo per service day you want to fill, one 9:16 story per day with the special, one carousel a week that walks through a full meal. Shoot during the quiet half hour before service, export in one batch, and plan the week in a social media scheduler so nothing depends on remembering at eleven at night. Regularity does more for a restaurant account than any single photo, which is why showing up beats the perfect post.
Tie the routine to a service, not to a weekday: the Tuesday lunch photo survives a week where Tuesday is chaos.
What if every post came out the right size, every time?
ReadyToPost builds your dish and dining-room visuals in the frame Instagram shows largest, then schedules the week around your services.
Create my week of postsDo / Don't
Do
- Shoot vertical and keep the plate in the center third of the frame.
- Use one ratio for every slide of a carousel, decided before you pick the photos.
- Export the week's photos at 1080 pixels wide in one batch.
Don't
- Drop a landscape website photo straight into the feed.
- Photograph the printed menu or the chalkboard and expect anyone to read it.
- Upscale a small photo pulled from a booking platform.
An illustrative case
Situation
Imagine a twenty-eight-seat neighborhood bistro whose Instagram is fed from the website gallery: wide shots of the room, taken for the homepage banner. In the feed each one shows as a narrow strip, the grid cuts the tables in half, and the owner re-crops every post by hand, differently each time.
Action
The owner sets 4:5 as the house size, writes it on the whiteboard by the pass, and switches the phone grid on. Every service, one vertical shot of the day's plate from above, plate centered, margins on all sides. The room is reshot once, upright from the entrance, in evening light. Files are exported at 1080 wide on Sunday afternoon and scheduled for the week.
Outcome
Each plate now takes roughly a quarter more screen than a square would, and more than double what the old landscape strip gave it. The grid reads as one restaurant rather than a collage, the crop box is never touched again, and a post takes a minute instead of ten. Guests start naming the dish they saw on the way to their table, more often than before. Orders of magnitude, not measurements: what changed is the size, not the food.
Your turn to fill the screen with the plate
A week of correctly sized posts, drawn from your menu and your dining room, scheduled before Monday's lunch service.
Common pitfalls
Where it usually goes wrong.
The website photo dropped into the feed
Homepage banners are landscape by design, and Instagram shows them at 1080 × 566: a thin band with more white space than plate. A photo taken for a wide screen never wins on a tall one. Reshoot the room upright once; it takes ten minutes and fixes the whole grid.
The menu shot as a document
A photo of the printed menu is text on a 4:5 rectangle seen on a phone: too small to read, cropped on the grid, and dull. Post the dish and name it in the caption. If people want the menu, the link in your bio takes them there.
Three ratios in one carousel
Instagram applies the ratio of the first slide to every slide. A square first, then a portrait, then a wide shot, and two of the three come out cropped. Pick the ratio before choosing the photos, then keep it, and decide which guest the carousel is for before you decide the order.
Takeaway
Your checklist.
- House size decided: 4:5 (1080 × 1350) for the feed, 9:16 (1080 × 1920) for stories.
- Phone set to vertical with the camera grid on, plate centered with margins.
- Room and terrace reshot upright, from the entrance, in the light you serve in.
- Week's photos exported at 1080 wide in one batch, carousel slides all one ratio.
- One feed photo per service day and one story per day scheduled before Monday.
What's next?
Method in hand. Time to put it to work.
With ReadyToPost
A method is set — still, you need time to put it to work. Readytopost frees that time by taking one front off your plate: your presence on the five social networks. Everything written, illustrated, scheduled — calibrated on your work, week after week. So your energy stays on the trade.
Start with ReadyToPostUp next
See how these principles play out day to day. Practice for restaurants gives you concrete, illustrated, adaptable levers — directly applicable the following week. No quarterly plans, no annual roadmaps: weekly gestures that touch something right away.
See it in practice
Questions
Frequently asked.
What is the best Instagram post size for a restaurant in 2026?
4:5 portrait at 1080 × 1350 pixels for feed photos of dishes, the room and the team; 9:16 at 1080 × 1920 for stories. Instagram also accepts 3:4 (1080 × 1440), which matches the profile grid exactly, so it is a good choice if the grid is your shop window. Whichever you choose, choose once and keep it.
Is 1080 x 1080 still a good Instagram post size?
It still works, and nothing gets cropped in the feed, but a square gives up a quarter of the height a 4:5 photo gets, and the profile grid now crops squares to a tall 3:4 anyway, taking a strip off both sides. For a plate or a room, portrait wins on screen and on the grid.
What size should an Instagram story be for a daily special?
1080 × 1920 pixels, 9:16 vertical. Keep the plate, and any words you add, away from the top and bottom fifth of the frame, where Instagram lays its own controls. A story is the right home for the one-night dish, the market find, the last three tables, and it fits the rhythm of a thirty-day plan far better than a feed post that has to age well.
Why does Instagram crop my restaurant photos on the profile grid?
Since early 2025 the profile grid shows every post as a 3:4 tall rectangle, whatever ratio you uploaded. A 4:5 photo loses a thin strip on each side; a square loses more; a landscape loses most of it. Keep the plate in the center of the frame and the crop never touches what matters. If the grid still looks inconsistent, the cause is usually a look that changes from photo to photo, not the size.
Can I use the same photo size on Facebook and Instagram?
Yes. 4:5 at 1080 × 1350 displays well in the Facebook feed too, so one export serves both. What changes between the two is the caption and the audience, not the file, which is why one photo can carry a Facebook post and an Instagram post the same evening with different words. Tools that start from your website, like ReadyToPost, do that split for you.
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Features
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From your website
From a single website URL, ReadyToPost builds your brand profile and starts generating on-brand posts — no manual brief to fill.
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Generate social visuals from your real photos — in your style and fonts, in the right format per network. Fix any detail in one sentence.
Knowledge base
A semantic memory of your brand's real facts, so every post cites what you actually do and have.
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Generate on-brand Instagram posts where the 4:5 feed visual and the caption are built together — a scroll-stopping hook, breathable paragraphs, and full-word hashtags grouped at the end, scheduled and ready to publish.
AI LinkedIn Post Generator & Scheduling
Generate professional LinkedIn posts, mention real people and companies right in the text, then publish to your profile or your company page.
AI Facebook Post Generator and Scheduling
Generate conversational Facebook posts, set your emoji and hashtag level, and schedule them straight to your Facebook Page. Text and visual built for the feed.
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