Videos? Instagram is a Terrible Place to Share Photos (Premium)

With Instagram pivoting to short-form video, influencers are freaking out and calling for the service to return to its roots in photo-sharing. That’s silly: Instagram has never been a great place to share photos. Ever.

You may have seen the news: Instagram is about to get even more terrible. It will shift from still photos to video, as noted. And it will push more recommended content at its users—vs. content from accounts to which we’ve subscribed—over the next year.

Members of the Kardashian clan, who I frankly couldn’t give a flying fig about, freaked out over the video news, and they reposted the following message: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”

It’s amusing to me that the Kardashians, the famous-for-being-famous family of influencers, are now so old that they can’t handle change. I jokingly compared on Twitter it to people my age complaining that MTV didn’t play music videos anymore. You may as well just shake your fists at the clouds, ladies.

There’s been a lot of back and forth over this topic. Instagram head Adam Mosseri quickly responded to the outcry but in an unexpected manner: after claiming that its pivot to video and other changes users were seeing was just experimental, Mosseri said that while Instagram would “continue to support photos,” he admitted that “more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.” In other words, he pulled a Microsoft: we hear your feedback, but we’re not changing.

Instagram was something that I came to slowly, and even in the years since I’ve adopted it as a way to share photos with the public, I’ve never really embraced it. And the reasons for both are the same: Instagram has never been, and is not today, a great place to share photos.

Instagram was initially known for two things: its weird and forced auto-cropping of photos into square shapes, no doubt to match its grid layouts, and its overly contrasty filters. Instagram photos were instantly recognizable as coming from that service, for better or worse. Over time, Instagram allowed users to post photos in their original aspect ratios, and one can, of course, ignore the filters. And so it was less offensive, I guess.

I only adopted Instagram when I changed how I use social media. Early on, I allowed anyone to friend me on Facebook, but that quickly became ponderous. And so I removed all the “friends” from Facebook, adjusted my sharing defaults, and have since used that service only to interact with family and friends, basically people I know in real life. And I was already using Twitter almost exclusively for work-related interactions, and it’s still where I spend the most time.

But I was interested in a way to share photos, generally, without regard to who would see them. That is, if there was some family event, I would post those pictures to Facebook. And I was very sensitive to posting pictures of my kids, especially, in a public forum, and I don’t like seeing others do that for the obvious privacy and safety concerns. But I travel a lot, and I eat the occasional notable meal. And Instagram, for all its faults, seemed like a reasonable choice.

And so I’ve used Instagram for that reason. It’s a place where I share photos publicly.

But Instagram, as noted, has so many problems. And I’ve often considered bailing on it for these reasons. Let me highlight the top issues.

The biggest one is that you can only post 10 photos at a time, a crazy limitation that’s made all the crazier when you consider that Facebook (which owns Instagram) lets you post any number of photos at a time to the same post. This is often an issue for travel and even meal photos, since I’ll have more than 10 photos for a single event and have to push them out to 2 or even 3 posts. That’s just unsophisticated.

And when you post multiple photos, they all have to be the same aspect ratio, and that’s determined by the first photo in the group. Ugh.

Also, the quality of posted photos is low. This isn’t Flicker, folks: photos are downsized and then, crazily enough, saved back to your phone so you have two copies of each, one low quality. Boo!

Put simply, if Instagram does shift to video, I’ll probably bail too. And while my complaint won’t be as impactful as that of the Kardashians, it’s not like I have a decent alternative. I guess I could use Facebook and manually edit posts to determine the audience each time or something. I don’t know. There’s nothing obvious out there.