Why I really, really hate Instagram

What the author fails to understand is that most people, like artists, use photography (and many other recording media for that matter) to create or communicate a certain mood or feeling, not to document reality with the highest fidelity possible.

Big, yellow, irremovable timestamps covering a chunk of the photo.

All the time data you could possibly want is already embedded in the file. Want to print it? Ok then, go ahead and put a timestamp on the corner if you really want to. But please don't destroy the original.

Ha ha, oh wow. No single sentence underscores the author's misapprehension of why people take most photos better than this. What's astonishing is that this is after he correctly grasps the concept of Instagram:

...it connects you to your friends, and it provides a way of sharing content with your friends that keeps you coming back to the app.

The astute reader will note that this doesn't sound like a solid data preservation strategy. But neither does connecting with friends sound like something particularly deleterious to the formation of memories. Quite the opposite: sharing signals memorability. If that comes at the expense of "destroying" the photo's accurate representation of the color of your couch cushions or the oiliness of your skin, so be it; those things are not memorable. The photo is not the memory.

Not everyone (and, in fact, and perhaps a bit unfortunately, most people) cares about quality. They'll take fun and convenience every time. This is why you see people still using MP3s or lossy AACs on iTunes, for instance, and not filling up drive after drive with lossless rips directly from CDs. A lot of folks just want ease and fun and sharing, and there's nothing wrong with that in principle.

I was a professional photographer before becoming a programmer. I think apps like instagram and hipstamatic are fantastic. Not everyone can to take the time to learn photo editing software, and filters add a new perspective on ordinary subjects.

(I am not entirely convinced that faux-polaroid effects are a tragic loss of data as he suggests.)

That much is apparent.

There are a couple of reasons the Instagram affects appeal to me, and I'm sure this applies to more people.

Nostalgia is fun. Memories have a way of distilling events down to their better parts. It's a natural adaptation. No one wants to remember the fight they had with their family on vacation. They want to remember the time that mom was startled by the bear that walked in to camp and went screaming in to the camper flailing the grilling instruments over her head. Mom, not the bear :)

Not everyone looks good in photographs. Maybe I don't want my likeness archived in high fidelity. When I recall fond memories, I don't remember my pale complexion and baggy eyes. I remember where I was, who I was with, and the good time we were having. This much is apparent by everyone's expression. And here's the cool thing, humans don't require a high-fidelity photograph to guess the disposition of the person in a photograph. We require very little detail. That's the great thing about our brains. It fills in the blanks very well. Personally, I prefer to fill in the blanks a little bit.

Cameras -- even film ones, and even big view cameras -- can't reproduce the full spectrum of color and dynamic range that the human eye can see. The result is that photographs often look "flat" in contrast to our memory of an event. When you look at photos taken by these old, vintage cameras, they have a certain warmth and color palette that doesn't match reality, but feels more interesting than a flat photo in some cases.

The reality is everyone thinks they are a photographer these days because everyone has a camera in their pocket. Most people take awful, horrid photos, and tools such as hipstamatic and instagram can make even bad photos visually pleasing. If it makes the user happy, it's fine by me. It's their phone/camera and their life.

[1] I know there's a version out that teaches you the real thing. Hope it does well. [2] It's still not my thing--too much time required--but I'm not going to spoil someone else's fun.

My Olympus digital camera from 2001 was a 4 megapixel item, flawed though megapixels are as a measure of quality, at those levels it did still matter, now my phone camera one-ups it in that department.

The problem is more, how and where do you store your photos so that you still have them, 40 years from now, which he does touch on to some extent. Somehow, I doubt Instagram will be the "system of record" for this, and for now, it's providing a service that some people find useful.

Some people like old technologies, or simulated old technologies. It makes them feel nostalgic, escaping to allegedly simpler times for a quick moment. It's about emotions, not technology. I get it, the author doesn't like doing that, but why judge people who do?

Archeologists one day will wonder 'why did they do that?'

500,000 users disagree

Images need to be uploaded. My iPhone uses T-Mobile with Edge. I do not want to wait for a 12MP photo to be transferred, ever. That is a prohibitive user barrier. Besides that, in the future they will be able to just say "ENHANCE" like in Blade Runner and this won't even be an issue.

Based on his other articles, this guy is either being intentionally inflammatory or should probably be medicated.