Speedy Square Crops for Instagram Carousel Posts

Zë Au Sol

8 Mar 2021 — 1 min read

Posting to Instagram, more than any other social platform is an art unto itself. To start with, they only allow three aspect ratios in a single post:

1:1
4:5 (portrait)
1.91:1 (landscape, very annoying!)

From a platform perspective, I understand the restriction, and from a photographer's perspective, it's gory-damn annoying, especially for details in landscape photos.

The workaround is a carousel post: a gallery of images. Due to the way Instagram lays the images out, there's no border, which when cropped correctly creates the illusion of a seamless scrolling vista:

One image split into two to populate a carousel post

This leads to the next problem: how does one quickly slice up an image into the requisite perfect pieces for Instagram? Imagemagick, of course!

magick convert -crop "1:1" fileToBeCropped.jpg croppedFile$02d.jpg

The result? 1:1 squares based on the height of the image. NB: this is for Windows, I believe for macOS or Linux one uses ' instead of ".

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