Get Your Export Settings in Lightroom and Photoshop Dialed in for Instagram

As photographers, we all want our work to look its absolute best no matter where it is being displayed. Since Instagram is a platform designed specifically for photos and video, it makes sense to prepare your images to look their best. Here is a quick tutorial for exporting your images just right for Instagram.

You are probably already somewhat familiar with the tutorials released by Julia Trotti. She is very good at getting right to the point and delivering helpful information right off, and this video is no exception.

Instagram, for some, seems to be a double-sided opportunity. Lots of money can be made through building and advancing your business through the use of social media. If you aim to do just that with your photography, then this tutorial is especially pertinent to you. The primary reason for resizing your images before uploading and then posting through the app is simply that if your images are larger than the allowable size, then Instagram will automatically reduce your images to an appropriate dimension for use on the app. This means that you are stuck with whatever quality you get when their automated system reduces the size of your image.

In some cases, this might not be noticeable, but in any case, you surrender control of the quality of your own image. If you only use appropriately sized images on the platform, then no reduction takes place and your image retains all the quality that you intended it to have in the first place. This video shows you, step by step, how to do just that.

Rex Jones's picture

Rex lives in Saint George, Utah. His specialty is branding and strategy, working closely with businesses to refine their branding, scale internal structure, and produce high-quality marketing efforts. His photography is primarily commercial, with intermittent work in portraiture, product imagery, and landscape photography for his own enjoyment.

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4 Comments

I made a template for this in photoshop. Made art boards for various sizes on Instagram. Stories, 1x1 and 4x5. Drag in the full exported file from Lightroom as a smart object and replace. Could always make an action also.

That's smart. I don't think I would have thought to do that, simply because most of what I export I do in Lightroom.

You can also upload it directly from Lightroom to Instagram using a plugin: https://www.lrinstagram.com/

Question is, for me anyway (except for the Instagram plugin mentioned below), how to efficiently get the pictures from a PC (windows) posted to Instagram with tags and description?