1080 × 1080 resize — center crop

Worked example

Resize a PNG to 1080×1080 for an Instagram square post with center crop: 1600×1000 becomes 1728×1080, 324px cut per side.

A 1080×1080 square is the default Instagram feed post for product shots and announcements, and it shows in full on a phone screen. On a phone the canvas is displayed at around 0.37 scale, so type under about 40px tall ends up near 15px on screen. The crop fills the whole 1080×1080 frame, so those zones sit on real picture content; check that nothing you need in the PNG lands under them.

Center crop scales the PNG by ×1.08 until it fills the frame, then trims 324px from each side of the canvas. That keeps the central 1000px of the source width (62.5%), so 300px at each side of the original is gone for good. Pick it when the subject sits near the middle and you want a full-bleed square with no frame.

PNG is lossless, so the crop adds no compression artifacts and any transparency in the source survives. The price is size: a photographic PNG at 1080×1080 commonly lands around 1.5 to 3 MB, several times a JPG, while flat graphics in solid colours stay far smaller. Platforms generally recompress uploads, so a large PNG costs upload time without keeping its lossless quality on screen.

A bakery owner has a 1600×1000 PNG shot of croissants with the tray in the left third. After the ×1.08 crop, 300px of source disappears at each side and half the tray ends up outside the frame. Move the subject toward the middle in the source first, or switch to contain if the whole tray must show. A PNG of this kind is around 1.5 to 3 MB; if the upload is slow or refused, that weight is the usual cause, not the 1080×1080 pixel size.

Before posting, open the file at 100% and confirm it reports 1080×1080, then shrink the view to about 400px wide to see what a phone feed shows. Compare with the original side by side to see exactly what the crop removed. The file is saved as name-preset.png; open it in a viewer with a checkerboard background to confirm what is transparent, and compare the size with the estimate above.

1600 × 1000 px · PNG

1080 × 1080 px · PNG

PNG at 1080×1080: the 324px trim is geometry for a 1600×1000 source; a different source ratio changes it, and the tool does not warn you before it cuts.