When you need your photos sized to a specific aspect ratio, cropping them down to fit it is easy, but cleanly expanding an image beyond its original borders is a lot harder. Fortunately, we have AI tools that can “imagine” what lies beyond an image’s edges and fill it in with a believable scene to expand it. Now, Instagram is rolling out a new feature that will let you do the same with your photos.
As spotted by Sam Sheffer on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram is adding a new AI expander tool for Stories. If you like a photo you took but wish it featured a little more around the edges, you can use artificial intelligence to generate more context for your image.
The main draw for this feature seems to be making existing images fit Instagram’s desired 4:5 aspect ratio better. When you take a photo with your phone, you usually need to crop it down to fit the app’s desired dimensions. By using the AI expander tool, you can fill out the rest of the photo without needing to crop the image or upload it with black borders.
By the looks of things, not everyone has access to this new feature just yet. There’s a good chance that Instagram is slowly rolling this feature out to its users in waves, so if you boot up the app and cannot find the AI expander tool, you may need to wait a little for it to arrive. In the meantime, there are plenty of ways to make your photos unique for Instagram without using AI tools.
