Introducing Your Instagram Feed on the Web | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Your Instagram Feed on the Web

blog.instagram.com

68 pointsllambda17 comments

> "We do not offer the ability to upload from the web as Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime. On the other hand, Instagram for the web is focused on making the browsing experience a fast, simple and enjoyable one."

I think that's a key part of the article. While I do understand their current vision to keep Instagram mobile upload only, I do wonder if that plan ever gets changed by a business decision with Facebook. I suppose time will tell if they can stick true to this or not.

As @NathanKP said, it is interesting to see some photo filters feel much more grainy on the web than they do on my iPhone.

I think it's smart for them to keep the mobile upload only strategy. It keeps their network free of reposted images instead of live pictures. Or at least it tries to.

I concur. I think they are still very much with the core of the initial Instagram concept - click/edit/upload photos easily on the go. The core concept still remains the same.

It also allows them to offload a lot of the processing to the client, and not have to worry about infrastructure to deal with cropping, resizing, etc.

It is definitely nice to be able to see Instagram photos at their full resolution on the bigger screen. Sometimes I forget that my phone camera is actually taking pictures with a fairly decent resolution. I do notice that some pictures which appeared nice and clear on my phone are actually more grainy than I thought when I see them on my computer screen at actual size.

Seeing images taken and uploaded from a nicer phone (e.g. iPhone 4s/5 or nice Android) and then viewing them on a non-retina device is really unfortunate. Instagram compresses images to serve up non-retina/high-density phones faster and the differences between the image quality is pretty drastic. I think the web images are probably the same as the retina/highdpi phones.

I began to notice this when Instagram made it easy to post full-resolution pictures to Facebook.

The beauty of having Instagram limited to only phones was that nobody would ever be able to see the noise and artifacts in my photos, especially the noise added by sharpening. Looking at my photos on the web, they suddenly suck.

Well, if it makes you any happy you can't view the photos on the web in full screen as yet. I just checked some of my photographs on a HD monitor. They ain't that bad!

It also does a pretty good job of being responsive :)

It's annoying that I can't see the images in a tiled / gallery fashion. For now I'll still use gramfeed.

Not as good as the Pokki app Instagrille for the desktop. The instagram website is barely useable.

No emoji support??

Right now we support emoji if the browser does as well--for example, Safari on the Mac.

Awesome, thanks for letting me know. Chrome users are stuck with empty boxes though. I'm curious how other sites (eg. GitHub) support emoji so seamlessly. A custom font-face?

GitHub does not really use emojis in the Unicode sense. It's special character sequences that are replaced with an image.

Instagram's very low resolution, 612x612 just won't scale to modern desktops.

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