Instagram is experimenting vertical profile grids and recognizes that this may screw up layouts

Instagram is testing what could be a major change to profile pages: turning the squares in your profile grid into vertical rectangles. Some users spotted the test, and there were indications that at least since 2022 the company was playing around with a rectangular grid.

"The vast majority of what gets uploaded to Instagram today is vertical," Mosseri says in an Instagram story from Friday discussing the test. "It's either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal."

"Squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram," he says, which was a limitation Instagram removed all the way back in 2015. Mosseri knows this change is going to be annoying for people who have spent a ton of time "curating and making sure everything lines up," but says "I would really like to do better by the content today."

"We're testing a vertical profile grid with a small number of people," Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai says in a statement to The Verge. "This is a limited test, and we'll be listening to feedback from the community before rolling anything out further."

Still, if you've meticulously planned out your profile grid around squares, you might want to prepare for those squares to someday change into rectangles.