Instagram Media Checker

What Instagram actually accepts

Photos must be JPEG. The publishing endpoint takes jpg and jpeg and nothing else, so a PNG, a WebP or a HEIC comes back as a format error even though every guide on the first page of results tells you PNG is fine. The photo ceiling is 8,000,000 bytes, which is 8 MB, for both feed posts and Stories.

Video must be MP4 or MOV. A feed or Reels video published through the API is capped at 300,000,000 bytes, which is 300 MB, and a Story video at 100,000,000 bytes, which is 100 MB. Carousels hold between 2 and 10 items, photos and videos can be mixed, and every item has to share one aspect ratio.

Aspect ratio has two bands. The hard limit runs from 9:16 up to 1.91:1, and anything outside it is refused outright. Between 0.8 and 1.91 the image publishes as framed; outside that narrower band Instagram crops it, so the checker warns rather than fails. Meta’s Reels reference documents a much wider range of 0.01:1 to 10:1, but the endpoint does not enforce that, so the checker uses the measured range instead.

Why the extension lies, and why that breaks uploads

The single most common cause of a format error is a file whose name says one thing and whose contents say another. A HEIC saved out of a phone and renamed to .jpg opens fine on a Mac and still gets refused, because Instagram reads the bytes, not the label. Converter pages miss this because they trust the extension too.

This checker reads the first bytes of the file and reports the real type. If your file claims to be a JPEG and is really a PNG or a HEIC, that shows up as the first failing rule with the actual type named, and the convert to JPEG fix is one click away in the same page.

The error codes people paste into search map to specific file properties. Codes 36001 and 2207005 come back on an image format Instagram will not take, which in practice means anything that is not a real JPEG. Codes 36003 and 2207009 come back on an aspect ratio outside the accepted range, which is what a very tall or very wide crop hits.

The phone app and a scheduler are not the same thing

Search results disagree wildly on Instagram’s limits because they mix two different routes together. Posting by hand from the phone app is more forgiving: it converts formats for you and accepts much larger video files. Publishing through the API, which is what any scheduler does, is stricter and refuses files the app would have quietly fixed.

That is why the same video can post from your phone and fail in your scheduler. The numbers this checker uses are the API numbers: JPEG only, 8 MB for photos, 300 MB for a feed video, 100 MB for a Story video, and a 9:16 to 1.91:1 ratio range. If you post by hand only, treat the verdict as a safety margin rather than a hard wall.

The rules here are the same ones JuzPost applies before it schedules a post, taken from a real publish against the Graph API on 2 September 2026 rather than copied from another blog. Duration and codec are reported for information: Meta documents 3 seconds to 15 minutes for Reels and 3 seconds to 60 seconds for Stories, with H.264 or HEVC video and AAC audio, but those bounds have not been confirmed by our own publish tests yet.

Checked here, fixed here, and nothing leaves your browser

The file never goes to a server. It is read, measured and, for images, rewritten entirely on your own device, which matters when the thing you are testing is a client’s unpublished video. It also makes the check instant, because there is no upload to wait through.

Images get a remedy attached to the verdict: convert to JPEG when the real type is wrong, compress when the file is over 8 MB, crop when the ratio falls outside the accepted range, or resize. Video is reported honestly and left alone. Transcoding video in a browser tab would be slow and lossy, so the report tells you exactly which setting to change on the next export instead.