Instagram ditches square-only photo format

Instagram is freeing its users from the constraints of the square. Yup, the photo filtering and sharing social network has officially announced that users can now post portrait and landscape photos.

While that’s not good news for the host of third-party apps offering those services, it’s at least a sign that Instagram has an idea of what its users want.

In the official blog post announcing the new feature, Instagram says that while the square photo “has been and always will be part of who we are”, it believes that “the visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first”.

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In fact, all the photos from those third-party apps seems to have inspired Instagram to allow the new photo formats. As it says in the blog post:

It turns out that nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format, and we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram: friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end.

In order to use the new format tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square.

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Once you share the photo, the full-sized version of it will appear to all of your followers. In your profile grid meanwhile, your post will appear there as a center-cropped square.

“We’re especially excited about what this update means for video on Instagram, which in widescreen can be more cinematic than ever,” Instagram says. “While we’ve historically had separate filters for photos and for videos, all filters will now work on all types of moments. You can also adjust the intensity of filters on videos, too”.

Instagram Video in Landscape – Examples from Instagram on Vimeo.