Instagram Feed Preview Planner: see the grid before you post
A profile grid is read as a whole. Each post is its own picture, but on the profile it sits next to eight others, and what a visitor takes in first is the pattern the tiles make together. An Instagram feed preview planner lets you arrange that pattern before anything is published: load the images you are about to post, put them in the order you intend to publish them, and look at the grid preview that results.
This one runs entirely in your browser tab. You pick files from your own device, drag them into order, and the grid redraws. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is cut up, and no separate image comes out at the end — the grid itself is the output.
A grid splitter takes one picture and cuts it into tiles that reassemble on a profile. A collage maker takes several pictures and composites them into a single new image. This tool does neither: your tiles stay separate posts, and the grid is a preview surface rather than a file you publish.
Grid order is the reverse of posting order
This is the part almost everyone gets backwards, and it is the reason a planner is useful at all. A profile grid fills newest first: the most recently published post takes the top-left cell, and older posts run left to right and down. So the post you publish last is the one that appears first in the grid.
The editable list here is deliberately in posting order, because that is how people plan — Post 1 is the next thing out, Post 2 is the one after that. The grid renders that list reversed, and every tile carries a badge with its posting position, so the two directions are never ambiguous on screen.
Push-down: what a new post does to the tiles below it
Publishing does not rearrange a feed, it displaces it. Each new post takes the top-left cell and shifts every existing tile one cell later. On a three-column grid that arithmetic is easy to feel: one new post slides the whole feed sideways and breaks every row it touches, while three new posts move each existing tile down by exactly one full row and leave the columns intact.
The “show next N posts” slider is how you watch that happen. At zero the grid is the feed as it stands today; move it up and the queue drains into the grid one post at a time, with the already-posted tiles that changed row outlined so the shift is legible at a glance. It is the quickest way to answer questions like what does the top row look like after the next three go out, or whether a run of dark tiles is about to end up clustered.
Framing, columns and cell shape
Grid cells are filled edge to edge, so a tall portrait shot loses its top and bottom rather than shrinking to fit. Each tile therefore carries a focal point — two normalised coordinates between 0 and 1 — and the framing sliders move it, so you choose what survives the crop. The column count runs from two to six, which covers the three-column profile grid and other layouts besides, and the cell shape comes from a shared list of plain aspect ratios rather than from a number invented here.
What stays on your device, and what does not
Every image is decoded straight to thumbnail size and released when you remove its tile, which is what keeps sixty pictures inside a phone browser's memory. The tool has no server, no account and no API key, so it cannot read an existing profile — the tiles for posts that are already live are images you supply and mark as already posted.
Saving keeps the plan's structure in this browser: tile order, the divider between upcoming and posted, the column count, the labels and the focal points. Image pixels are far too large for that store, so a restored plan shows labelled placeholders and you re-add the files. Exporting the plan as a JSON file is the way to carry it to another device, and every imported field is re-checked and clamped before it is trusted.