How to post square videos on Instagram

Instagram has changed the way your videos display. You used to be able to easily choose to publish square videos, but they just changed it to have horizontal or full screen vertical video reels. Here is a hack if you still want your videos to display as square posts.

Full Width Horizontal Instagram Video

Instagram has changed video display options. You can have videos display full width horizontally. But this might be showing things you had planned to crop out by making the video a square.

Full Screen Vertical Instagram Reel

Or you can have full screen vertical reels. But if you have been taking videos that you plan to use as squares, you are probably cropping off things you want to include.

Trim doesn’t trim the size of the picture. It trims the beginning and end of the video.

This only discards the edits you just made in Instagram, which you don’t want to keep anyway.

For a lot of your videos this might be just fine. Try it. You can watch your video without publishing it to see if this will work.

If it won’t, just click the little back arrow at the top left. Then click Discard.

Discard only loses any edits you just made in Instagram. If you made any changes to the video in another app, this doesn’t Discard them.

Choose any photo at all.

So, start a new post again and choose any photo at all. This photo won’t really be used, so it doesn’t matter what photo you use.

Click to crop the photo to a square

Then click the icon to turn the photo into a square.

Square photo

You don’t have to worry about centering this photo or anything because you are not going to use it.

Click to add more photos to the post

Next, click the icon to add more photos to this post.

Add your video as the second item in the post

Select the video you actually want to use. It will have a little two, because it is now second in your post.

Remove the photo you do not want to post

Then go back and click the 1 on the first photo you selected. That removes it from the post and leaves the video as 1.

That’s it! Finish up and publish your square video as usual!