Instagram Highlight Cover
Maker

These steps come from Instagram's help center for the iPhone and Android apps. To make a new highlight, go to your profile and tap New. If you do not see New, tap Story highlight. Select the story or stories to include and tap Next, then tap Edit cover to choose a cover photo and enter a name. Confirm with the button in the top right and the highlight appears on your profile.

To change the cover of a highlight you already have, tap and hold the highlight on your profile and tap Edit Highlight. The help center says highlights can be edited at any time to change the cover photo, name or included stories. Make the cover here first, so the PNG is ready on your phone when you open the editor.

Whether the cover can come straight from your photo library or has to be one of your stories is not spelled out in the help center. The FAQ below covers that question.

Name each highlight after the first question a new visitor would ask. Every name below is an icon in the picker, so you can make the whole row with the matching set option.

• Online shops: Shop, New in, Sale, Reviews, Shipping and FAQ.
• Cafes and restaurants: Food, Coffee, Drinks, Find us, Events and Reviews.
• Coaches and consultants: About, Results, Tips, Pricing, FAQ and Contact.
• Fitness and health: Fitness, Health, Results, Tips, Pricing and Reviews.
• Beauty and salons: Beauty, Hair, Jewelry, Pricing, Reviews and Find us.
• Creators and travel: Travel, Photos, Videos, Guides, Favorites and Links.
• Events and venues: Events, Music, Find us, Photos, Pricing and Gifts.
• Local services: Work, Pricing, Reviews, Contact and Find us.

Instagram's announcement of the feature says highlights appear in a section below your bio, so visitors read them as one group. Choose a palette of two or three colours and use it on every cover.

Use one icon style, one size and the same label rule everywhere. In this tool that means choosing a palette, a layout and a size once, then switching to a matching set, where every cover is drawn with the same settings.

Keep text to one short word and heed the contrast warning before you download. Then look at the whole profile: write the bio with the Instagram bio generator and check how a new post sits in your grid with the Instagram post preview.

Instagram's help center does not publish a size for highlight covers, and we did not find one on other official Meta pages. The covers this tool makes are 1080 x 1920 pixels, the 9:16 story shape. Meta's developer documentation recommends 9:16 for story images, and Meta's design requirements for Stories ads recommend 1080 x 1920, so it is a sensible size to start from.

Instagram's guide to Stories describes highlights as round covers under your bio, so only part of a tall image is visible. The dashed circle in the preview is as wide as the image, and the dotted circle marks the area the tool keeps your artwork inside. Instagram does not document the exact crop, so check the result on the Edit cover screen and make the artwork smaller if anything touches the edge.