

Thinking Outside the Square: Landscape and Portrait Formats on Instagram - gwintrob
http://blog.instagram.com/post/127722429412/150827-portrait-and-landscape

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acjohnson55
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?

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CardenB
Just like you said, a multibillion dollar company is changing a defining
feature. Does that not seem newsworthy?

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acjohnson55
It does, and I feel I acknowledged that. I just wonder if it says something
about our economy as a whole that something so trivial could be so important.
I'm a huge fan of the progression toward simplification, represented by
Instagram, Twitter, etc. over the incumbents they displaced. I just think the
missing piece is how to also provide basic adaptability without sacrificing
that core of simplicity.

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spike021
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.

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signaler
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.

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bkmartin
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!

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jewel
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.

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dublinben
Portrait videos don't work properly on mobile though. When you fullscreen the
video, it forces your screen horizontal leaving massive black bars on either
side.

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Andrex
Not anymore: [http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/21/our-long-national-
ni...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/21/our-long-national-nightmare-is-
over-youtube-on-android-now-shows-vertical-videos-properly-in-full-screen/)

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pjbrunet
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.

