Photo sharing app Instagram announced an important update today, and it’s everything. From now on, you can post portrait or landscape photos on the app without worrying about the automatic square crop.
Uh-oh. Looks like photo editing apps like InstaSize may need to scramble for some added features, stat.
So why the sudden change of heart? They’ve adopted a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” stance, based on the reasoning in their blog: “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,”
Naturally, they took to their Instagram page to announce the good news:
Today, we’re excited to announce that—in addition to square posts—you can now share photos and videos in both portrait and landscape orientation on Instagram.
Square format has been and always will be part of who we are. That said, the visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first, and we want to make it simple and fun for you to share moments just the way you want to.
When choosing a photo or video, you can now tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square. The full-sized version will show up in feed in a beautiful, natural way. To not disrupt your profile grid, your post will appear there as a center-cropped square.
We’re especially excited about what this update means for video on Instagram. All filters will now work on both photos and videos, and you can now adjust the intensity of filters on videos, too.
To learn more about the changes in today’s update, check out blog.instagram.com. Instagram for iOS version 7.5 is available today in Apple’s App Store, and Instagram for Android version 7.5 is available today on Google Play.
Great! Now all we need is for Instagram to allow us to save photos, repost them, and make it easier to find search for people on the app. In the meantime, though, this new update is pretty swell.
