Safe Zone & Grid Preview

A post that looks right in your editor can look wrong once it is live. The same file is shown full screen on Reels and TikTok, with the app drawing a caption and a column of buttons over the bottom and right edges. It is cropped to 4:5 or left wider in the feed. It is center-cropped to a tall 3:4 tile on the profile grid, which changed from squares to 3:4 in early 2025. Text placed for one of those places often lands under a button or outside a crop in another. Checking each one by hand means posting, looking, deleting and trying again.

The crop views are calculated from the actual size of your file, not from a rule of thumb. Instagram and TikTok both center-crop by default, so the tool does the same and then reports the result in plain numbers. A 9:16 Reel cover loses 12.5% from the top and 12.5% from the bottom in the 3:4 grid. A 4:5 photo loses about 3.1% from each side, because a 3:4 tile is narrower than 4:5. A square photo loses 12.5% from each side. If your file has a different shape, the percentages change and the tool shows the new ones.

The safe-zone overlays come with an honest limit. Neither Instagram nor TikTok publishes one official chart of caption and button zones for ordinary posts. The numbers used here come from creator guides and from percentages reported from Meta's Reels ad guidance (14% top, 35% bottom, 6% sides) and TikTok's in-feed ad guidance. Those sources disagree. The bottom margin on Reels runs from 320 px in some guides to 672 px in the ad percentages. So the overlay has two tiers. Red marks the area the app usually covers. Amber marks the extra area it sometimes covers, depending on caption length, device and app version. If your text sits in clear space, you are fine under either reading.

The universal safe box does the planning for you. It is the overlap of the Reels margins, the TikTok margins, the 4:5 feed crop and the 3:4 grid tile on a 1080 x 1920 master. With typical margins it is about 895 x 1315 px. With cautious margins it is about 840 x 963 px. Download the transparent guide as a PNG and place it as the top layer in your video or design editor while you work, then remove it before you export.

Everything runs in your browser. Images are decoded and drawn on a canvas on your device. For a video, the tool captures the frame you pick from a local copy and never sends the file anywhere. YouTube Shorts is not covered yet, because there are no margin figures we could verify. The same 1080 x 1920 file works there, but check the zones in the app. The final test is always the app itself, so post a private draft on your own phone before you publish.