Instagram has become the primary avenue for photographers to share their work, but if not appropriately handled, Instagram can ruin the look of your images. Here is the best way to export your photos from Lightroom if you want your pictures to stay as sharp as possible.

Recently, a local wedding venue shared one of my images on their Instagram page. I don’t mind sharing my photos with other local vendors, but in this case, it looked so terrible that I called the company and asked them to take the image down. I honestly felt that it was bad enough that it would have hurt my brand for potential clients to see the picture. Now, I deliver correctly sized files to vendors for social media use to take out the potential error of others uploading my photos. If you want to know the best way to do this, this video from Becki Peckham of Becki and Chris will show you how.

As Peckham says in her video, the key to keeping your photos sharp on Instagram is to do all the cropping and resizing work before the upload instead of letting Instagram do it for you. For example, if you are posting a vertical image, you need to crop it in Lightroom to Instagram’s 4:5 ratio restriction. The second step is to export to the maximum size that the social media platform allows to prevent the dreaded compressed look that can happen to large images. Both of these steps are easy if you know what settings to use for your photos. To see the exact specifications and export settings that Peckham uses, take a look at the video above.

Lead image by Pixabay user FirmBee, used under Creative Commons.