Reels Safe Zone Checker

The safe zone is the area of your Reel cover that isn't covered by Instagram UI elements (like/comment buttons, caption, profile picture). Text and important visuals should stay within this zone to be fully visible.

Three areas of the frame get covered by interface elements. The top strip carries your profile picture and username. The right edge holds the like, comment, share and audio buttons. The bottom band holds the caption and call to action. Upload your frame above and the tool overlays all three so you can see exactly what is obscured.

Keep anything that must be read — text, logos, faces, prices — inside the central column of the frame, clear of the top strip, the right-hand button column and the bottom caption band. The practical habit is to design in the centre and treat the outer edges as background only, because the exact interface heights shift between app versions and devices.

Reels are 9:16 vertical, exported at 1080 by 1920 pixels. The tool also checks 4:5, which is the tallest ratio for a feed post — worth checking if you are repurposing the same video into the feed, because the crop moves everything and text that was clear in 9:16 can end up under the caption in 4:5.

Yes, and assuming they are the same is why repurposed videos so often have text sitting under a button. Both platforms use the right edge for actions and the bottom for captions, but the heights differ and TikTok's bottom band is generally deeper. If you post the same vertical video to both, keep critical elements well inside the centre so it survives either layout.

The cover has its own problem: it is displayed as a tall thumbnail in the Reels tab but cropped to a square on your profile grid. Anything important therefore needs to sit in the centre of the cover so it survives the square crop — titles aligned to the top or bottom of a cover routinely get cut in half on the grid.

Stories use the same 9:16 frame as Reels, so the overlay here is a close guide. The difference is the interface: Stories add a progress bar and your profile row at the top, and a reply field at the bottom, so keep clear of the top and bottom edges by a similar margin and avoid placing a call to action where the reply box sits.