Instagram's Identity is Eroded by Update

Recently, Instagram made an update to their app allowing photographs of different size formats other than square to be uploaded. Once the update was announced, millions of users shouted for joy on the internet because it means they don’t have to use third party apps to fit their wide landscape photos into the square Instagram previously required. The photos now look comfortable, relaxed and somewhat unconstrained in the new update. As a regular Instagram user, I am thrilled that Instagram was finally able to make this change. Now I can upload full photographs without having to make the pictures look awkwardly cropped.

My photographer’s side disagrees with this update. Since it first launched in 2010, Instagram made the square photo look cool. The experience was that the picture was something taken with the camera on the app icon. The pictures would only be square because that was the way the camera on Instagram operated, Instagram was a camera, the modern digital polaroid. You couldn’t change the size of the polaroid, the pictures came out square and there was nothing you could do about it. There was an artistic sense to the whole process, a fun challenge even, that set it apart from other cameras.

Instagram for many years embraced that concept and the square photo again became iconic and the popularity of it became synonymous to the company. Wherever Instagram users saw a square picture, they would immediately think of the app because the square photo, along with the faded blue hipster cursive font, was part of the branding that made Instagram popular. That has sadly changed now. Now that the update is in play, it feels likes Instagram has lost part of the foundation that it was once built on.

Instagram was unique in that aspect and giving in to the peer pressure of making this update has either reduced it, or changed it to something it never meant to be. In their blog, Instagram posted an article saying that the update was made because “the visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first.” Part of the fun, though, was trying to tell that visual story in that limited space.

This update parallels Twitter changing its 140-character rule or Vine changing their six and a half second video rule because people assume telling a story in that amount of time is too hard. We know that it can be done and that it goes to show that a story can be told with certain constraints. Obviously, not everyone on social media is there simply for the artistic challenge. However, the identity of these different apps made them unique. It made them a place where like-minded people with similar interests could express their passions in a particular manner. With each passing update, it gets harder to tell one app from another, undermining whatever artistic value they had in the first place.

I will miss the old Instagram. I will miss the square-only rule that set it apart from all other photo sharing apps. I will miss the beauty and simplicity that it had on Instagram. With constraints and obstacles creativity is born. Instagram no longer acknowledges this.