Note: This post is no longer being updated!
Thank you for your interest. Please see the comments below for up-to-date solutions & ideas. These days, I personally just use the “Return” key within the Instagram app to create line breaks, which has been working for me for the past year or so. The solution below also still works for me, but I no longer use it as frequently.
This has been bugging me for a long time, but I’ve finally discovered a way to create line breaks on Instagram. In my captions, I often find myself wishing I could insert a line break between thoughts, or after a quote, but I’ve never been able to find a consistent way to do so until now.
A lot of the online tutorials I’ve seen instruct you to use the Notepad app to write your desired caption or bio blurb, and then copy & paste it onto Instagram. I find this works for me less than half the time. If it works for you, carry on! It’s definitely worth a try.
For me, the surprising fix has been to use the Facebook app. It’s incredibly simple, too: open up the Facebook app and click on “Update Status”. On the screen that appears, shown in the photo above, write your caption. Remember to use the “Return” key on your keyboard to make sure the app is recording your line breaks.
Copy the whole thing, and paste it into your Instagram caption or bio. The apps should preserve your line breaks and when you post the photo the caption should be just the way you want it to look.
You can do the same thing for your Instagram bio, but I have noticed that it doesn’t preserve the full space between lines like in photo captions. For bios, it usually just jumps down directly to the next line as shown above.
I’d also encourage you to play around with it a bit! As you might have noticed, for the caption of the photo above, I had written in two full line breaks – one after the quote, and the other before the hashtags – yet on Instagram it only preserved the first one, and just put the hashtags directly on the next line. It’s hard to say why it did this for one but not the other, because it’s all a bit mysterious. It doesn’t even matter if I enter two “returns” on the Facebook app, sometimes it just gives me one line break or even just pushes the content to the very next line. Experiment and see what works for you.
Let me know in the comments below if this fix worked for you, or if you have any other tips or questions about Instagram.
You can follow me on Instagram @stephpellett to see photos of my travels.
I took what I had in notepad and pasted into FB. Then reselected it to copy it into IG. It worked!
So glad it worked for you too!
The Facebook tip worked really well for me. Thank you.
I’m so glad!
it still didnt work for me i am so annoyed =(
I’m so sorry. I think it can definitely be hit or miss sometimes. Good luck!
If you have a computer, go to Instagram.com, log in, and in the right top corner, click your profile pic and select Edit Profile. In the Bio area, enter your biography as you wish, and the line breaks will effectively sync with your IG account when viewing it in mobile format. Guaranteed to work.
Thanks for your tip JM! I get mixed results with this tip though.
Thank you!!
I’m glad it helped!
Bummer, I did all of the below, typed into notes, then into Facebook .. then into IG, still no line breaks. It literally used to work, just by hitting enter on mine, but then it stopped doing it! So odd .. any other thoughts on why IG fights this formatting?
I have no idea why Instagram doesn’t allow the formatting. There are a lot of features I wish they allowed!! I’m sorry this didn’t work out for you. I would suggest possibly trying to just type into Facebook (ie. no Notes) and then copy paste. I don’t have any rationale as to why that would work better besides the fact that it’s what I did and it worked for me. Good luck!
If you have a computer, go to Instagram.com, log in, and in the right top corner, click your profile pic and select Edit Profile. In the Bio area, enter your biography as you wish, and the line breaks will effectively sync with your IG account when viewing it in mobile format. :)
If you have a computer, go to Instagram.com, log in, and in the right top corner, click your profile pic and select Edit Profile. In the Bio area, enter your biography as you wish, and the line breaks will effectively sync with your IG account when viewing it in mobile format.
using computer then works ^^ thanks
You have to have 1 character on each line for the line break to work. The best way to do this is to use ‘special spaces’ so that it looks clear.
Go to http://www.tagsforlikes.com/centerbio.html and copy the special spaces on that page between the arrows. Put that space on each line where you want the line break and the line break will stay there.
This seemed to work for us – thanks Zaheer! http://www.affecthealth.com
Super helpful, thanks. It worked for me. I just needed a paragraph break, so I only copied one blank space, and then pasted it in the “paragraph break” I needed. Perfect solution. :-)
What you can do is copy this “⠀⠀⠀ ⠀” into your instagram caption.
This worked for me, with a combination of also not having punctuation or emoticons at the end of each line! Winner :)
Same here https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/724b43f711f9684604af86bf20d933cd46728870175865cbd1d80406e3e01eb0.gif
Where do you put that?
Yes it works. Feel free to check out MEGA GRAM if you ever need new followers. 5000 followers for $1 … Doesn’t get any better than that haha https://MegaGram-Followers.blogspot.com
Worked great! Thanks!
I’m so glad! You’re welcome.
I was only able to make it work from Notes into Instagram when I removed the punctuation at the end of each sentence. In most cases I originally had a period or sometimes a quotation mark. Once I removed those, the line breaks took effect. Only took me upwards of three hours to figure this out. Thanks Instagram. It’s 2014, btw.
Huh. That’s so interesting! Good to know that punctuation matters. Thanks for the tip Tyler! And yeah I know, it’s so ridiculous haha.
I can confirm that eliminating the punctuation at the end of each sentence took care of it!
This tip just saved me! Thanks so much for noting punctuation- I never would have guessed that removing periods at the end of a sentence would make a difference.
AHHH! Finally. This tip is definitely the winner. My grammar brain will be twitching every time I commit this crime, but at least it works.
I’m super late to the party but excited that this work! Yay for no punctuation! I removed the punctuation at the end of my sentences and waalahh! Thanks for sharing <3 https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9db4424a8467e47ec2fd14c1bfd048372e5f43fe003d9542e2fb76b17aeb723d.png
Awesome! It worked! Thank you!
For every sentence? Or did you just remove punctuation at end of sentence before break?
It’s so frustrating.
wahhh it didn’t work for me :( thanks for trying to help us haha!
~christina
http://www.currentlyexploring.com \ @currentlyexploring
I’m sorry :( it doesn’t work for me every time either but this is the method that works most often. Good luck!
If you have a computer, go to Instagram.com, log in, and in the right top corner, click your profile pic and select Edit Profile. In the Bio area, enter your biography as you wish, and the line breaks will effectively sync with your IG account when viewing it in mobile format. It’s sure to work.
Click on the [123..] button at the side of your keyboard, the one that access the numbers, the ‘return’ key is located in there and works like a charm! :)
Unfortunately that rarely works for me! I’ve heard about it and tried several times but it never worked. Glad it works for you though!
Thanks it worked for me :)
Of course it is right there! Duh…
Worked out for me, thanks a lot! :)
Thank-you! That was driving me CRAZY trying to figure out how to make line breaks. carlyanne.xox
It didn’t work for me :(
I eliminated the punctuation at the end of the sentence before pressing enter to put in the line break.
This worked like a charm!
ON INSTGRAM I LIKE TO PUT THE SPCACE
SEE
I just visited http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5583507/line-break-in-facebook-status-update-via-graph-api.. On Facebook we could use
The only thing that worked for me was to not put puntaction marks at the end of the sentences. Why is Instagram so complicated, haha. This should be a easy thing! Thank you for this guide anyway! x
Worked for me!!! Thanks girl!!
Hit the shift key on your keyboard first and then hit return… this worked for me AND you can keep punctuation at the end of your sentences too!
Just used this and it worked a treat! Thanks for the info!
Thank you thank you… this has been doing my head in and I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Tried the FB trick and worked like a charm. Thanks!
Thank you! This worked for me. :)
You can just do it in Message.
Fantastic. Fixed my profile! – Thank you :-)
https://instagram.com/misplaced_brit/
It worked for the bio for me :) Thanks so much!!
Additionally, anytime one clubs a baby seal, they get an automatic line break in their instagram comment, caption, and/or bio.
I’m glad I found this and great tip. I’ve also written a post recently on photo and composition tips for Instagram, here’s the post http://travelphotodiscovery.com/15-instagram-tips-for-better-photos-and-compositions/
Thank you Stephanie. I used the iPhone FB app as you’ve shown, manipulated the text (carriage returns) then c&p’d into IG. One thing I did do, and I don’t know that it helped the cause, was to use the Up Arrow in conjunction with the return key to move my text down. May have worked fine without that but I’m too lazy to test it the other way around:-)
Worked beautifully!!!!!
Thanks so much!
This was so helpful, thank you! After playing round a little I found I can do it directly in the app by removing any punctuation or emoji’s then posting. I can then go straight back and add the punctuation and emoji’s again then click done and the line breaks stay :)
This was very helpful, thank you!
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About – Daily Business Bargains
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About - Blog E-Course
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About | That's JUST CRAZY
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About - Online Marketing Blog
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About – CRI Emails
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About | MarketingTumbler.com
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About – Ageekk
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About | Mobile Marketing and Branding Mobila
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About | The Branding Bar
Pingback: Instagram Hacks | Black Cat Agency
Pingback: 15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features Everyone Should Know About | WebSetNet
Thanks a lot for the tip, it helped! so simple lol <3
Chiara
http://www.culturewithcoco.com
Very cool thanks! :-)
Thank you!! This has been bothering me since I started using IG! I did it the FB way for my bio and it worked. I haven’t tried it on pictures yet but I will. I also saw the comment about the link for special spaces and will try that as well. Thanks again!!
worked great, thanks
This worked fantastically, thanks!
I did on my Facebook and work, just don’t put emoji at the beginning of the paragraph.
Thanks for the tips… you are a genius!! I’ve been racking my brain trying to trick IG to keep the returns – problem solved :)
Thankyou! Being trying to work with out for ages! Facebook status worked great for my bio! Thankyou!
My problem is that it’s still too many characters because it counts all the spaces as a character.
Thank you!!!
Pingback: 13 Insanely Effective Hacks for Instagram Domination - Shop Pulse | Peace of mind for e-commerce entrepreneurs.
Thanks for the tip on adding line breaks to Instagram captions and bios! I’ve had mixed results with the Notepad method, so using Facebook to manage line breaks is a game-changer. Will definitely give this a try!