Frames in Instagram are decorative overlays you add to Stories, sitting on top of your photo or video without covering the important bits. You find them by opening the sticker tray in Story editing and searching by name or event. Some are made by Instagram, others by independent creators through the Meta Spark platform. I use them mainly for birthdays, polls and countdowns, since they add a bit of polish without extra design work.
The short version: Instagram Story frames are the border overlays, multi-photo layouts, and branded stickers you can add around your story content, either through Instagram’s built-in tools (the frame sticker, layout templates, camera effects) or by importing a custom design from an app like Canva. Used sparingly they make a story look polished and on-brand. Used on every single post they slow your viewers down and quietly kill your completion rate.
What people mean by “Instagram Story frames”
This phrase covers three different things and most explanations online lump them together, which is why the topic feels more confusing than it needs to be.
- The frame sticker. A decorative border, often event-branded (think a conference logo frame, a “New Year 2026” frame, a wedding hashtag frame) that you add on top of a photo or video from the sticker tray.
- Layout frames. The grid templates that let you split one story into two, three or four photo sections, similar to a polaroid collage.
- Custom-designed frames. Borders you build yourself in Canva or Photoshop, export as a transparent PNG, then layer on top of your story as an image.
All three do the same job in the end: they give your raw photo or video a bit of structure and branding without you having to be a designer. But they’re not interchangeable, and knowing which one you need saves you a good twenty minutes of fiddling.
How to use the built-in frame sticker (step by step)
This is the one most people mean when they search this. Here’s exactly how it works, because Instagram’s own help pages are frustratingly vague on it:
- Open the camera or upload a photo/video to your story as normal.
- Tap the sticker icon (the little square smiley in the top toolbar).
- Search “frames” in the sticker search bar. If there’s an active event, location, or brand frame nearby, it’ll show up here automatically, sometimes based on your GPS location or a hashtag you’ve used.
- Tap the frame you want. It drops onto your story as a border you can resize by pinching, and drag to reposition.
- Add your other stickers (poll, question box, music) after the frame, not before, otherwise they can end up sitting underneath it and looking odd.
If you’re at a specific event and want your own branded frame available for attendees, you submit a design through Facebook’s Camera Effects platform (Spark AR was retired for this in 2024, so it now runs through Meta’s own frame submission tool). It typically takes 24 to 48 hours for approval, and it needs to be tied to a specific location or event, you can’t just make a generic frame for your business and expect it to surface for random users.
How layout frames work
If you want to fit two or three photos into one story, don’t screenshot a collage app. Instagram has this built in:
- Tap the camera icon, then look for “Layout” in the mode row along the bottom (next to Boomerang, Superzoom, and Hands-free).
- Pick from the grid options (2, 3, 4, or 6 photos).
- Tap each section to fill it from your camera roll or take a new photo live.
- Rearrange sections by dragging, or swap the grid style entirely before you post.
I use this most for before-and-after client screenshots, one side showing a client’s Instagram bio before we worked on it, the other showing the rewritten version. It takes under a minute and looks far more credible than two separate story slides that viewers might skip past individually.
Building your own custom frame in Canva
This is the option nobody explains because it involves leaving Instagram entirely, which feels counterintuitive, but it’s the one that gets you a consistent brand look.
- In Canva, start a design at 1080 x 1920 pixels, the exact Instagram Story dimension.
- Design your border, logo placement, and any text boxes, but leave the entire centre area transparent (this is the bit your photo or video will show through).
- Download as a PNG with a transparent background, this setting is easy to miss and is only available on paid Canva plans, not the free tier.
- Save that PNG to your camera roll.
- In Instagram, add your photo to a story first, then tap the sticker icon, choose “Gif” if you want, but for a custom PNG you add it as a second image layer using the photo/sticker upload option, or some creators use a third-party app like Unfold or Preview to merge the two before uploading as one flattened image.
The flattening step matters because Instagram doesn’t let you natively layer two full images on top of each other inside its own camera, only stickers and text sit on top cleanly. Most tutorials skip this bit and leave people stuck wondering why their frame won’t stick to the photo underneath.
A real example: what happened when I overused frames
Back when I was leaning hard on Instagram for lead generation, I went through a phase of putting a branded frame, my logo in the corner, a thin gold border, on every single story for about six weeks. It looked consistent. It also looked, in hindsight, like an advert every single time someone opened my story ring.
I pulled my insights at the end of that stretch and my average story completion rate (the percentage of viewers who watched through to the last frame in a sequence) had dropped from around 61% to 43%. That’s not a small dip. When I went back to plain, unframed photos and videos for the following month, completion rates crept back up to 58%. The frame itself wasn’t ugly, but it added a visual “this is content marketing” signal that made people tap past faster.
The lesson I took from that: frames work best as an occasional flourish, for a launch day, an event, a specific campaign, not as a permanent visual identity layer on every story. Treat them like a seasoning, not the whole dish.
When frames help
- Live events. A conference or festival frame instantly tells viewers where you are without you typing a caption.
- Milestone announcements. A birthday, anniversary, or “we hit 10k” frame gives a plain photo a reason to feel like an occasion.
- Multi-photo recaps. Layout frames for a day-in-the-life story or event recap save time and look tidier than six separate slides.
- UGC campaigns. If you want followers to post using your branded frame (say, for a product launch), it gives you a free, low-effort way to see who’s tagging along, and it’s a nice bit of social proof when it shows up in other people’s stories too.
When to skip frames entirely
- Daily business-as-usual updates, behind-the-scenes clips, quick polls, these do better raw and unfiltered.
- Anything where authenticity is the whole point, a heavy frame reads as “produced,” which works against you if you’re trying to look approachable.
- Low-light or already-busy photos. A frame on top of a cluttered image just adds more visual noise, and if you’ve ever wondered why some Reels or story clips look brighter or different on upload than what you shot, adding another design layer on top only compounds that problem.
Practical tips that make frames work better
- Keep any frame under about 15% of the total canvas, thin borders read as polish, thick borders read as an advert.
- Test your frame on both light and dark photos before rolling it out. A white-lettered frame disappears against a bright beach photo, for instance.
- Save your custom frame PNG as a template you reuse, don’t rebuild it from scratch every time, that’s the whole point of doing it once in Canva.
- Check who’s watching before you commit to a heavier design. If you’re unsure who is watching your Instagram Stories, that data tells you whether a polished, branded look or a raw, casual one will land better with that specific audience.
- If you’re building a content plan around frames for a launch, plan the sequence out first. My own approach to coming up with creative ideas for Instagram Stories always starts with the story arc, then I decide which slides earn a frame and which don’t.
A quick word on where this fits into your wider strategy
Frames are a small, cosmetic tool. They’re not going to fix a story strategy that isn’t working, and Stories overall still make up a huge chunk of daily engagement on the platform, so it’s worth getting the basics right before you worry about borders. If you want the full context on how Stories behave now compared to a few years ago, the current Instagram statistics for 2026 are worth a read, they show completion rates and daily usage patterns that back up exactly what I found with my own frame experiment.
And if something about the sticker tray, the layout tool, or your story posting isn’t behaving as described here, that’s usually an app version issue rather than something you’re doing wrong, worth checking the Instagram help reference before you assume it’s user error.
Related reading: what is the use of repost in instagram.
If your question is a different Stories one, the Instagram Stories guide lists every answer I have written.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a story frame and a story sticker?
A frame is specifically a border or overlay design, often tied to an event or brand, while a sticker is the broader category that includes polls, GIFs, location tags, and frames themselves, frames are technically one type of sticker.
Can I make my own custom Instagram Story frame?
Yes, design it in Canva at 1080 by 1920 pixels with a transparent centre, export as a PNG, then layer it over your photo using a story editing app like Unfold or Preview before uploading, since Instagram’s own camera doesn’t let you stack two full images natively.
Why isn’t a location or event frame showing up in my sticker search?
Event and location frames only appear if Instagram’s system detects you’re at that specific place or you’ve tagged that location, and branded frames need prior submission and approval through Meta’s Camera Effects platform, usually 24 to 48 hours, so it won’t just appear for any business on request.
Do frames hurt or help engagement?
It depends entirely on frequency, an occasional frame for a launch or event adds context and looks intentional, but I’ve personally seen completion rates drop nearly 20 percentage points when I used a branded frame on every single story for six straight weeks, so treat frames as an occasional tool, not a default setting.
