After a testing phase of a few months, the change became official and did not meet with great success among users: Instagram says goodbye to “square” previews to make room for vertically oriented “rectangular” ones.
On the one hand there are those who have commented enthusiastically on this change, even if they are mostly professionals, defined as “the biggest news since the app launched”. On the other hand, however, and these are mainly content creators and simple users, someone was keen to underline the fact that “Instagram just ruined every photographer’s feed”. And in fact the photos published on the famous Meta social network, if observed in the profile feeds, no longer appear centered, as they are automatically modified by the new setting, which clearly lowers the quality of thepreview.
He was perfectly aware of this himself Adam Mosseri who, on the occasion of the presentation of this change in August last year, had evaluated the result of the change with his own eyes. The CEO of Instagram had in fact hoped to“find a way to best manage this transition”since the scheduled update could have resulted“annoying for some users who spent a lot of time curating their feed and making sure everything lined up properly”. And so, in fact, it went, at least if you read the comments left by numerous dissatisfied users on the main social networks.
Despite the negative feedback, however, Mosseri did not want to retrace his steps and Instagram, starting from the night between Friday 17th and Saturday 18th January, took on the new graphic layout. The only solution that the developers came up with to overcome the problem, even if this did not meet with great success, was to add the button “Edit Preview”: by clicking on it it is possible to adapt the old contents of different formats to the new rectangular setting, filling the gaps that are inevitably created with a white or black background.
But was this change really necessary? Why do it now? There is little doubt about it: Meta’s main purpose is to favor the video format Reelthe short videos with which Instagram wants to compete with Tik Tok, a social network that already has a vertically rectangular layout. “I know some of you really like squares and that square photos are a bit of an Instagram tradition”Mosseri declared last Friday 17 January before the changes became official, “but today most photos and clips uploaded are in portrait orientation, and it’s a real shame to have to crop them too much”.
“In the long run, people will be thrilled that more photos and videos will actually be visible in your profile just the way you want it, rather than aggressively cropped”added the CEO.