Image Splitter

Why split an image into tiles

The most popular reason today is the Instagram carousel grid — posting a single wide image as multiple square tiles that, viewed together on a profile, reassemble into one large picture spanning several posts. Done well, it is a striking effect that makes a profile stand out. Achieving it requires cutting one image into precisely aligned pieces, which is fiddly by hand and trivial with a splitter.

Beyond social media, tiling is used to create sliding puzzles, to break a large image into manageable pieces for printing across multiple sheets, and to prepare image assets for games and interactive layouts.

Getting the Instagram grid right

For a profile grid, the arithmetic matters. Instagram displays profiles three tiles wide, so a panorama split into three columns occupies one row of the grid, and a taller image split three by three fills a nine-post block. Because Instagram posts are square, your source image should match the combined aspect ratio of the grid — a three-by-one split wants a source three times wider than it is tall, or the tiles will be cropped from squares awkwardly.

The order of posting is the counterintuitive part. Instagram fills a profile grid right to left and top to bottom as you post, so the tiles must be uploaded in reverse of how you read them for the picture to assemble correctly. Planning this before posting saves having to delete and redo the whole sequence.

How the splitting works

The image is divided into equal rectangles based on the columns and rows you choose, and each tile is cut from the corresponding region at full resolution. There is no quality loss — each tile contains the exact pixels of its region of the original, simply extracted into a separate file.

The tiles are named with their row and column position so you can reassemble or post them in the correct order without guesswork, which becomes important once you have more than a handful.

A note on dimensions that do not divide evenly

If the image width does not divide evenly by the number of columns, the tiles cannot all be exactly equal, and a row or column of pixels at the edge may be dropped. For most purposes this is invisible. Where pixel-perfect tiles matter — a puzzle that must reassemble exactly, or print tiles that must align seamlessly — it is worth first cropping or resizing the source to dimensions that divide cleanly by your grid.

Downloading many files

Splitting into a large grid produces many downloads at once. Browsers sometimes ask permission before downloading multiple files, and you may need to allow it. The files land in your normal downloads folder, named in order, ready to use.

Other practical uses

Printing an image larger than your paper size by tiling it across several sheets and assembling them. Creating a jigsaw or sliding puzzle. Preparing sprite sheets or map tiles for a game. Breaking a long infographic into shareable segments. Each of these is the same operation — a clean, aligned grid cut — applied to a different end.

Processed in your browser

Splitting happens on a canvas locally. Your image is never uploaded, and each tile is generated on your device.

Frequently Asked Questions