Safe zone checker

How it works

TikTok. As of November 2026, TikTok publishes downloadable safe-zone templates for its ads and says an ad’s safe zone gets smaller as the ad’s caption gets longer. We found no pixel margins for organic photo posts in TikTok’s Creator Academy or ads help. The red bands here are an unofficial estimate from three third-party guides that disagree with each other: adkit.so, TryMyPost and House of Marketers. We could only read these guides in search results, so treat the numbers as low confidence.

Top, left and right use the largest value we found: 260 pixels at the top, 200 on the right and 150 on the left of a 1080 by 1920 slide. The bottom follows the caption length you pick: 20 percent, 500 pixels (26 percent), or a third of the height. TikTok states the caption rule for ads only; we assume photo posts behave the same way, which TikTok has not confirmed.

Instagram. Instagram moved its profile grid from squares to taller tiles, reported as 3:4 around January 2025. It has not published a pixel size for the tile. The tool crops your frame to a centered 3:4 shape and shades what falls outside it. A 3:4 slide loses nothing, while a 4:5 slide loses about 3 percent of its width on each side. Only the first slide of a carousel shows in the grid, and the feed shows the whole slide.

Your image. The file is opened with your browser and displayed in an image element, with an SVG laid on top. It is not drawn to a canvas, not uploaded and not stored. The tool reads its pixel size, names its ratio, and warns when it does not match the frame. For Instagram it also warns when the ratio falls outside the supported photo range of 1.91:1 to 3:4, and notes that photos upload at up to 1,080 pixels wide (Instagram Help Center).

How to use the result

Keep the words that matter inside the dashed rectangle. Pictures can run into the red areas, because covering a background does little harm, but a headline under the caption area or the buttons may be hard to read. If you write long captions, choose the longer caption setting.

Do not treat the numbers as a specification. They are a rough rule of thumb, and apps change their layouts. Before you publish, look at the post in the app’s own preview or as a draft, on a real phone if you can, and move anything that is covered. If your first slide is a hook, check it first, since it is the one every viewer sees.

Use one ratio for the whole post. TikTok’s Creator Academy advises cropping all photos in a post to the same ratio, and that also keeps this preview honest. For Instagram, remember that the grid shows only the first slide, so keep its subject near the center, where the 3:4 crop will not cut it.

Check again after any layout change, such as a bigger font or a longer title, because moving one element can push another into a covered area.

For sizes and background, see the TikTok safe zone article. To check the text itself, use the slide contrast checker and the slide text checker.