How do I make clean Instagram story layouts for photos?

Build the story on a 1080 × 1920 canvas, keep photo and text out of the top and bottom 250 pixels where Instagram's interface sits, and export as PNG. Postfolio builds stories and feed posts from the same project, so a photo series looks the same in both places.

Stories are where most photographers are sloppiest — a full-bleed photo, a default sticker, done. That is fine for behind-the-scenes, but if you post a finished series to the feed, the story announcing it should look like it belongs to the same body of work.

The format is unforgiving in one way: the top and bottom of the screen are covered by Instagram's own interface (your name, the reply bar), so a layout that looks centred in the editor can look cramped on a phone.

Story layouts in Postfolio

1. Switch the format to Story. In the free web app or the iOS app, set the format to 1080 × 1920. Your existing carousel slides can be carried over — the templates re-flow to the taller canvas.
2. Mind the safe area. Keep the photo and any type inside the middle of the canvas, away from roughly the top and bottom 250 pixels. A bordered photo sitting in the middle third with a line of small type underneath is the most reliable layout.
3. Export as PNG. Stories are compressed harder than posts; starting from a PNG at the exact size keeps type crisp. Post from your camera roll and skip Instagram's filters.

Posts and stories from one project

The practical advantage of building both in the same place is consistency: the same border width, the same palette, the same typeface. In Postfolio a project can hold feed slides and story slides side by side; change the palette once and both update.

Typography that behaves

Postfolio's text reflows like a word processor — manual line breaks, real kerning, considered defaults per template family — rather than the fixed text boxes of most story tools. For a photographer that mostly means one thing: a caption or a location line that looks set, not typed.

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