How do I add equal white borders to Instagram photos?

Place each photo on a 1080 × 1350 canvas and scale it so the gap to every edge is identical — in pixels, not in percent of the photo. Do it for the whole carousel at once so portrait and landscape photos get the same margin. Postfolio's gallery border does exactly that in one tap.

The white border is the oldest trick for making a feed look like a portfolio: the photo becomes a print on a wall instead of a screen-filling snapshot. It is also the easiest one to get slightly wrong, and slightly wrong is very visible — a landscape photo with a thin side margin next to a portrait one with a wide one looks like an accident.

The reason is that most 'add border' tools scale the border with the photo. What you want is the opposite: a fixed margin on the canvas, and the photo fitted inside it.

Equal borders in Postfolio

1. Add the photos of the carousel. Mix portrait and landscape freely — the border logic handles both.
2. Set the margin once. Pick the gallery border and choose the mat width. Postfolio measures it in 'pt' — one pt is one pixel in the 1080-wide export — so 40 pt means a 40-pixel border on every side of every slide. Presets run from 0 to 50.
3. Choose the mat colour and export. White is the classic; the palette tool can pick a tone from the photos instead. Export gives you every slide at 1080 × 1350 with identical margins.

Which margin looks right?

For a gallery feel, somewhere between 30 and 50 pixels on a 1080-wide slide. Below 20 it reads as a hairline rather than a mat; above 60 the photo starts to look small on a phone. If the carousel contains a seamless panorama, remember the border must be applied to the panorama as a whole, not per slide — otherwise the seam shows. Postfolio handles that automatically.

Borders and Instagram's compression

A large flat white area compresses well, so bordered slides tend to come out of Instagram's pipeline looking cleaner than edge-to-edge ones. Export as PNG so the only compression that happens is Instagram's own; Postfolio does this by default.

Questions, answered straight.