@PhotoFairytales Looks lovely on IG! 
Thanks Janey!
I think this might have been a little comment from the “How to Ace Instagram” webinar where it was mentioned some areas of the site may be displaying photos differently in the future, but please don’t panic.
To start with this is just going to be on a new feature we’re adding to the site (but may be rolled out to other areas like gift guides if displaying images this way seems to work well).
In this feature images will be displayed at the original proportions you uploaded them at (like Pinterest currently do), so you won’t need to alter your photos to fit a new crop, and if you upload square images they will still show as square. However it will mean for people who have tall or wide images, their photos won’t be missing big parts as their thumbnails in this section will match that.
@PhotoFairytales We switched to the majority of our images on both Instagram and Facebook being 4:5 around a year ago. Our single photo posts on Facebook also get the blocks of colour to the side, but a lot of the time we’re sharing more than one image in a post, and you don’t get it with those.
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Phew, thanks Kim! 
Hi Kim, on mobile (Chrome), I see all search results photos as 5:4 (portrait) which results in lots of edges poorly cropped off. Is this something peculiar to my phone?
The search has been a little different since we changed to the current version of search in 2022. For search it shows rectangular thumbnails, but the proportions will vary to suit the device you’re viewing on, for example on mobile they’ll be portrait, if you rotate your phone they should still be portrait but not as tall. If you view on desktop they’ll be landscape, but again exactly how wide will depend on your window size.
Unfortunately that makes it difficult to give an exact size to make your photos, but means search is giving a good size thumbnail whatever device you’re on.
Because of this, it’s a good idea to make sure your item is fairly central in the first photo, and there’s some background to all edges of the item, so it’s not too much of an issue if that gets cropped off. It may be something we look into more in the future as search is something we want to improve on.
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I see there’s a facebook post from Folksy about this now - thank you! Maths was never my strong point so can someone tell me why we need 5:4 images when the IG grid displays at 3:4 and still cuts the edges off?
Also, has anyone found a good Canva template for making Folksy Friday boards in future?
Regarding the folksy Friday board, I use polaroid like pictures that are rectangles, and in the middle there is a square element that fills up with the square pictures. I also added the name of the shop of the bottom part of the polaroid frame, so it doesn’t look odd and empty. I’m happy with that at the moment, as I don’t like the added colours on the edges when you just try to fill it with squares. Here is how what I mean
https://www.instagram.com/p/DGDWKdXMYLJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
interested to see what people will come up with in the future
That’s brilliant - thank you. It looks great. Is there a free template for something similar or would I need to make one like it from scratch? (no idea how to do that, I don’t find Canva very intuitive, so any tips would be appreciated!)
Try if this one works alright for you. It’s the same one I made for me, (I don’t mind you using it) all you need to do is add the pictures you want in each frame and if you want some text. I believe you can change the colours to your liking, and the folksy badge in the middle. Let me know if it works, I haven’t shared a canva template before 
I’m having a nightmare with my images on IG now - I’m working to the new shape but it keeps kind of zooming in on the pictures and cropping it top, bottom, left and right. The image I uploaded today looks horrible. I spent so long making sure it was the right size, had a little space on the left and right as suggested. What am I doing wrong?!! 
I think that, although you have correctly taken/created the image at 4:5, when you’ve uploaded it, Instagram has (by default) loaded it up as a square, so all sorts of squishing has gone on once it is in your grid.
So try this: Click the “+” to create a new post, select your (4:5) photo. Then, before doing anything else, you should see a small circle icon with < > in the bottom left-hand corner of your photo (sometimes hard to see depending on the photo background). Click on that icon and it will expand your photo to 4:5 format (click it again and it will go back to square format). Once it is in 4:5 format click “Next” at top right of screen and proceed as usual.
Hope that helps - I have no idea what the problem might be if you’re already doing that!
Thank you so much Mina, it works perfectly, I’m having lots of fun tinkering with it and will be sharing it on Friday! You are a star 
Not a problem, glad it’s working and it can give you a base to work with x
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Oh my goodness, thank you @Eiderglass! I’ve not managed to post today but I had a go at pretending to upload the image for yesterday’s post again, found the <> button you mentioned and yes, it changes it to 4:5! I’ll just have to make sure I click that button each time - although I’m hoping that when IG finally finish rolling out this change I won’t need to. I wish they’d just do it and be done, rather than making my nice profile page look out of whack. It messes with my OCD tendencies!
Thanks for your help 
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Does anyone know how to stop the 4.5 crop from chopping off the bottom/top of my images please? I spend so long creating them its really depressing to post images that don’t show the whole image?
Have you tried the solution @Eiderglass posted above? I do find that every time I post I need to change the format on the post from square to the (4:5), by following the steps mentioned. It seems that they haven’t changed they default size when posting, so we need to do it manually each time x
Yes, thanks, I’ve figured out how to do it now, so the next one should look a lot better!
The other problem of course is instagrams 4.5 crop doesn’t work at all for landscape, I assume because SM is aimed at bloggers and pretty young things who want to do selfies …… hey ho such is progress