
The best export settings for Instagram in Lightroom Alternatively, if you upload at 100%, you also compress at 100%. Therefore, if you’re uploading at 75% quality, then you’re compressing 75% quality. The actual quality of the algorithm is quite good - compressing file size considerably at little loss of quality - so it’ll be hard to tell, but there’s definitely compression there. Upload an image at 50% quality at less than 500kb and extract that image from the desktop version of Instagram (right click > inspect element on your image > expand the sibling DIV > right click to open your image in a new tab > save) and compare it to your original image. There’s too many variables, and therefore the most reasonable approach is to standardise all images, even if it ends up being parity or just a check. It needs to be that way because it doesn’t make logical sense to assume that the user’s compression is better than their own.
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Instagram is optimising for images to load as fast as they can for the best experience, so they try and reduce the file sizes of your images so there’s less to download and thus your feeds load quicker.

The reason why they do this is the same reason why many websites squash images too (including this website you're reading this on!) - performance.

Some other things we do know, though, is that Instagram also uses what’s called an image compression algorithm on all images that get uploaded to their servers. They will always be cropped to fit at 1080 pixels wide unless it’s exactly that size.

