Story & Reels Safe Zone Checker
Vertical video is never cropped by these apps. It is covered. Drop a frame from your reel, story or short and the region left clear of the captions, buttons and profile rows each app draws on top is outlined, with everything they sit over dimmed. Save the marked-up frame as a reference while you edit.
Frame and the apps that draw over it
Frame
Vertical 9:16 — 1080x1920
Every surface here takes a full-frame 1080x1920. None of them crops it; they draw over it.
Drop your story or reel frame
One file at a time, up to 50.0 MB — this page’s own decoding limit, not the platform’s. It is decoded and composited in this tab and never uploaded.
Nothing loaded yet. Drop an image above — it is composited inside this browser tab and never uploaded.
Design the frame around the interface
The safe zone is a constraint. Moda is where the title card gets built inside it.
Try Moda free →Nothing is cropped, and that is why it goes wrong
A banner problem is easy to spot because the missing part is missing: you export, you upload, half the image is gone. A story problem is worse precisely because nothing is missing. Every one of these apps shows your whole 1080x1920 frame, then draws its own interface over the top of it — a profile row and a close button up top, a caption, an audio credit, a follow button and a progress bar along the bottom, and on TikTok, Reels and Shorts a column of buttons down the right edge. Your text is still there, technically. It is underneath a like button. Editors show you the frame without the interface, which is why this failure survives all the way to publish so reliably.
The bottom is the expensive edge
The margins are not symmetrical and the difference is large. The top costs somewhere between about 110 and 270 pixels depending on the app. The bottom costs up to about 480 on TikTok and Shorts, because that is where the caption, the account name, the audio credit and the progress bar all stack — and the caption grows downward as it grows longer, so a long description eats further into your frame than a short one. The right edge is the one people forget: 140 to 180 pixels of action rail on the short-video surfaces, and even a plain story keeps a margin there for the stickers and the close button. If you remember one thing: put nothing in the bottom quarter, and keep clear of the right-hand sixth. Tick every app at once and the outline shows you exactly that region.
Same frame, five different interfaces
The reason to check against several apps at once is that a single 9:16 export usually goes to all of them. An Instagram story is a shallow frame with generous top and bottom margins and no right-hand rail. A Reel has a shallower top and a much deeper bottom. TikTok is deeper still. Snapchat sits somewhere in between. A layout built against one of them is not safe on the others, and the intersection is meaningfully smaller than any individual app's — which is the honest budget for a caption card you intend to post everywhere. If that budget is too tight for what you need to say, the answer is two exports, not a smaller font.
These numbers are approximations, and always will be
No platform here publishes a safe zone as a specification. The figures come from the creative specs each one gives advertisers and from measuring current layouts, they are rounded, and they change — a new button appears, a caption gains a line, an app adds a progress bar. The page marks every one of them approximate for that reason. Use them as a working margin with room to spare rather than as an edge to sit exactly on, and if something absolutely must be legible, keep it well inside the outline rather than against it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the safe zone for TikTok?
Roughly 130 pixels off the top, 480 off the bottom and 150 off the right of a 1080x1920 frame, which leaves about 870x1310 in the middle. The bottom figure is the one that surprises people: a quarter of the frame is spent on the caption, the account row and the progress bar. Those numbers are measured rather than published, so treat them as a margin with a little room rather than an exact boundary.
Is the safe zone the same for Reels and Shorts?
Close, and not identical, and the difference runs in both directions — which is why ticking one is not a proxy for the other. Reels reserves the most width on the right of anything here, about 180 pixels, and takes the deepest bite out of the top; Shorts leaves more room at the top and on the right but adds a progress bar along the bottom. Tick both at once and you get the region that works for either, which is the useful answer when the same export is going to both.
Should I just design everything in the middle?
For anything that must be read, yes. But a frame with all its content stacked in a narrow central band looks like it was designed around a constraint, which is its own problem. The better approach is to treat the covered regions as deliberately empty: let the background, a gradient or the continuation of a photograph run into them, so the interface lands on something that was always meant to be quiet.
Can I check a video rather than a still?
Not here — this page takes an image. In practice a still is what you need: the safe zone is a fixed property of the app, not of your footage, so exporting one representative frame (usually the one with your title card on it) answers the question for the whole clip. Check the frame where your text is largest and you have checked the video. Whichever frame you drop, it is composited and marked up on a canvas in this tab and never sent anywhere, which matters when the footage is unreleased.
How is this different from the banner safe area checker?
The banner page deals with cropping: a device shows less of your image than you uploaded, and the question is what is still in frame. This page deals with occlusion: the app shows all of your image and puts its interface on top, and the question is what is still visible. Two different failures that happen to be answered by the same shape of rectangle.