How to preview your Instagram grid in Notion

Method 1: build a grid with a gallery view

This works in any Notion workspace, with nothing to install.

1. Make a database for your posts, one row per post, and add a Gallery view to it.
2. Put each post’s image on the row, either as the page cover or in a Files & media property.
3. Open the view’s settings (the ••• at the top right of the view), choose Layout, and set Card preview to the page cover or to your files property.
4. Set Card size to Small and hide every property on the cards, so only the images show.
5. Sort by your post date, newest first, which is the order your profile shows them in.

That gives you a wall of your planned images in feed order, and for a quick sense of whether a month hangs together it is genuinely useful.

Where a gallery view stops

• It is not three across. Notion has no column setting; the number of cards per row follows the card size and the width of the window, so the same view shows three on a laptop and five on a big screen.
• The tiles are the wrong shape. Instagram’s profile grid now crops every post to a tall 3:4 tile. Gallery cards crop to their own shape, so a face or a headline that is cut off on your real profile can look fine in Notion.
• Reordering means editing dates. To swap two posts you change two dates by hand, and a manual drag in the gallery does not change when anything posts.
• Nothing gets posted. Notion cannot publish to Instagram, so once the grid looks right you still open Instagram and post each one by hand, in order, on the right day.

A gallery view shows you roughly what your feed could look like. It cannot make it look like that.

Method 2: embed a live Instagram grid

A grid embed is a small app that reads your Notion database and draws the feed exactly as Instagram will, inside the same Notion page. With Ninecast:

1. Start free at getninecast.com/start. You get a planner link.
2. In your Notion page, type /embed, paste the link and click Embed link. The grid appears in the page.
3. Click Connect your Notion, tick the page your content database is on and click Allow access. Your posts fill the grid straight away.
4. Confirm the columns: which one is the date, the caption and the images. Nothing has to be renamed.

What changes compared with a gallery view:

• The real shape. Tall 3:4 tiles, three across in a narrow page like the phone app and wider on a big screen like Instagram on the web, so the crop you see is the crop your followers get. Carousels and Reels show as what they will become.
• Drag to rearrange. Drop one post onto another and they swap dates, and the new dates are written back into Notion. Your posting days stay put; only which post sits on which day changes.
• It updates as you plan. Change an image, a caption or a date in Notion and the grid follows within about a second.
• It can post them. Connect your accounts and each row publishes on its date, with the post’s link written back into the row.

The preview on its own is free, with no card and no time limit. The setup guide shows every click with what you will see on screen.

Which one to use

If you only want a feel for how a month looks and you post by hand anyway, the gallery view is enough. If you care whether the grid will look the way you planned, or you are showing it to a client, embed a real grid. If you are also tired of copying captions from Notion into Instagram, use one that posts.

More on the grid itself is in the Notion Instagram grid preview, and what the free version includes is in the free grid preview for Notion. Planning for several clients? See Ninecast for social media managers. Planning in Airtable? There is an Airtable grid preview too. To check a single image against every Instagram crop, use the free crop checker.