Common reasons to split an image
- Instagram carousels. A wide panorama or a designed banner cut into three pieces becomes a swipeable post where each slide flows into the next.
- Profile grids. A 3 × 3 or 3 × 2 split turns one big picture into a mosaic across your feed.
- Printing large. Split a poster into tiles that each fit on a sheet of paper, print them, and tape them together.
- Sprite sheets and icon sets. Cut a sheet of equally sized game sprites or icons into separate files using a fixed tile size.
- Puzzles and classroom materials. Make jigsaw-style pieces or cut a worksheet into individual cards.
Rows and columns vs tile size
There are two ways to describe the grid, and each fits different jobs.
Rows × columns divides the image into equal parts no matter its size. Use it for social media splits, posters and puzzles, where you care about the number of pieces.
Tile size in pixels cuts fixed-size squares or rectangles, such as 64 × 64 px. Use it for sprite sheets, texture atlases and map tiles, where every piece must be the same exact size. If the image is not an exact multiple of the tile size, the leftover strip on the right or bottom becomes smaller edge tiles.
The tool allows up to 100 tiles, so a 10 × 10 grid is the maximum.
Getting carousel splits right
For a seamless 3-slide carousel, the image should be three times as wide as one slide. Instagram supports square (1:1) and portrait (4:5) slides, so good source sizes are:
| Slide shape | Ideal source size | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Square | 3240 × 1080 px | 3:1 |
| Portrait | 3240 × 1350 px | 12:5 |
If your panorama has a different ratio, crop it first, or Instagram will crop each slide for you and the joins will no longer line up. Keep important details, like faces or text, away from the cut lines so nothing gets split awkwardly between slides.
Output and quality
Tiles keep the format of your original: a PNG becomes PNG tiles, a JPG becomes JPG tiles. Cutting does not resize or resample anything, so each tile has exactly the pixels of that part of the original. All tiles are bundled into a single ZIP file, so you get one download instead of dozens.
To open the ZIP on a phone, use the Files app on iPhone or the file manager on Android, which can both extract ZIP archives. On a computer, double-click it. If you need to reassemble tiles later, the merge images tool can join them back into a grid.