Thinking Outside the Square: Landscape and Portrait Formats on Instagram

Isn't it kind of absurd that this is news?

On one hand, I totally get it that a multibillion dollar company is altering one of the defining aspects of its user experience, and that's a really big deal. But if you erase that context, it's also a little ridiculous.

My mind is also drawn to making a parallel with struggling Twitter, where you have "essays" composed of indexed sequences of 1-2 sentence thoughts and where people resort to taking screenshots to make quotations of other content. At some point, you have to wonder if the medium is still serving the content as well as it could. Will they be bold/risky enough to break out of their arbitrary constraints?

Personally, I think this is the wrong decision. I prefer freedom of photo dimensions/format, but on the other hand keeping photos on IG restricted to square crops gave them more personality on a social media format. We can already upload photos of whatever size/crop onto Twitter, Facebook, etc.

It is not that I especially fear change, but when it comes to services like Instagram, you don't want to mess up your secret sauce. This reminds me of when Coke changed their recipe and churned away vast swathes of their customer base. Is this feature creep? If it is feature creep, then users should be able to 'peel back' advanced options like this instead of being bombarded with choice when they take a photo.

YAY! I started on instagram not too long ago... and being forced into the square was my number 1 problem with their service... I think this is going to be great!

I've often wondered if youtube should abandon the fight and allow for portrait videos. After all, a lot of viewers are probably on mobile where they'd rather view it in portrait orientation anyway.

Or they should have used Masonry in the first place :-/ Now that I have no reason to play the 1:1 game, I can go back to loooong photos that work better everywhere else.