The Verge: “Instagram profile grids are going to feature rectangles instead of squares”

Instagram’s profile grids will display content as rectangles instead of squares as part of a change rolling out over the weekend, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in an Instagram Story on Friday.

I know some of you really like your squares. And square photos are sort of the heritage of Instagram. But at this point, most of what’s uploaded, both photos and videos, are vertical in their orientation, Mosseri said. It’s a bummer to overly crop them, he added.

Jay Peters

This change caused quite a bit of uproar in my small photographic community, and on Threads more broadly.

Personally, I don’t mind it that much, as I haven’t bothered to curate my profile grid with borders on photos to match the square grid or by building a sort of collage out of multiple posts. But for others the results look awful; the new aspect ratio (3:4) isn’t even the same as the maximum vertical ratio allowed for posts (4:5), so regardless of what you choose to post now, it will get cropped one way or another!

Instagram grid layout after update; some of the more affected profiles are those who consistently post square images, such as comics

Ironically, the update hasn’t made its way to the web app, so if you’re feeling nostalgic for the square grid, it’s alive and well on the desktop. Even more ironic: with all this talk of AI and machine learning, a mega-corporation the size of Meta can’t figure out a way to scan individual profiles, pick out which is their most-used format for uploads, and tailor the profile to best fit that one instead of shoehorning everyone into the same suboptimal layout. But that just shows us where their priorities lie.

The update did come with a new tool to ‘adjust preview’ – you can find it on each individual post in the top-right menu – but let’s be honest, who in their right mind would spend the time to do this one-by-one on all their previous posts?! The ‘adjust preview’ is very limited as well, only offering two choices, either the default crop or filling the image inside the 3:4 box with white or black borders, so you can’t actually choose to frame a certain part of the image inside the preview.

View on Threads

Worst of all, the timing of the sudden change, during the weekend TikTok is supposed to get banned in the United States, smells of a shameless and transparent attempt to lure those users away. Meta announced a couple of other things that fall into the same category: that Instagram now allows Reels up to 3 minutes long, doubling the 90-second limit the platform had in place before, and a CapCut rival called Edits – CapCut being ByteDance’s video editing app that got removed from mobile app stores as part of the TikTok ban.

At this point, Instagram would really benefit from carving away Reels into its separate app to stop these video-centric features from messing with the photo side of the app. But at least it serves as a good reminder for photographers, and creators in general, that social media platforms are a poor substitute for personal websites, and that their business interests rarely align with creativity and the promotion of art.