About a year ago, Instagram moved into the realm of video sharing. Now, not only can you share your favorite photos with the world, but you can also share your favorite 15-second video clips. If you are already familiar with Instagram, you know that the format of this photo/video-sharing app allows you to post a square-shaped image. This sounds reasonable enough, until one day, you load an amazing video onto Instagram and discover that the automatic square-shaped cropping results in some of your body parts being cropped out of sight.

The image on the left is a screenshot of a video that I took on my iphone. Looks great, right? The image on the right is a screenshot of the automatic cropping that occurs as soon as the video is loaded into Instagram. My top leg is cut off!!

No need to panic. We have solutions. Here are two quick and easy options to correct this issue.

Option 1: Squaready for Video AppDownload the free “Squaready for Video” app onto your phone. Upload your video into the app, and it will automatically put your full video into a square shape by adding borders in the color of your choice. This is a great option if the subject of your video occupies a large portion of the frame. This app allows you to maintain the entire image without any square cropping at all. When you upload your video after using the Squaready app, your video will appear in Instagram as shown below.  As you can see, I’ve chosen white borders to fill in the empty portions of the Instagram square.

Option 2: Video Crop & ZoomThe second option is to download the “Video Crop & Zoom” app. This app allows you to zoom in on any portion of the video and crop it into a square shape for Instagram as shown below. Not only can you create a square-shaped video, but by having the capability to zoom in on the subject, you can eliminate unwanted background/foreground.

Although this process is a bit more time consuming than using the Squaready app, I prefer having a video that fills the full square frame on Instagram. When you upload your video after using the Video Crop & Zoom app, your video will appear in Instagram as shown below.

Download one or both of these apps to see if you prefer one over the other. You may find that both of these apps are helpful in different situations.

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