instagram, portrait, landscape

The latest update to Instagram for iPhone adds built-in Portrait and Landscape support for photos and video… sort of.

After years of redefining square photography and making it cool for a new generation, Instagram has finally added native support for landscape and portrait photos in its latest update released this week. It’s good but not perfect. Here’s how to find it, how to use it, and what to expect.

In all previous versions of Instagram, in order to post landscape or portrait photos, you had to use third-party apps which added a “matte” to edges of your photo. This didn’t really post a tall or wide picture, but shrank the size of your photo and made everything fit within the square frame. Often, this would look fine in Instagram but the additional padding at the edges of the images sometimes could look silly or small when shared to other services such as Facebook and Twitter.

instagram-landscape-lofi-0815Instagram now let you post square, tall, and wide format photos natively in the app. They appear without additional matting on the edges of the photos, which makes for a better visual experience in the Instagram app in my opinion.

How Do I Make my Pictures Tall or Wide for Instagram?

Instagram still defaults to a square crop when you import a photo. To import a landscape or portrait photo from your camera roll, simply pinch and move the photo onscreen when importing.

Instagram will crop the photo a little bit. It crops images to a 4:5 aspect ratio which is a little smaller than the iPhone’s native 4:3 photo shape. This slightly squat image my put some iPhoneographers off.

Natively, Instagram still only shoots square format photos in app. Why are you still shooting with the Instagram app? For a lot of reasons, you should never use Instagram is an app camera unless you absolutely have to.

To share your images with their full crop, you will still need a third-party Instagram-dedicated cropping app. I’ve been using Squareready Pro for years and still love the app. Of course, those solutions work by adding padding to two sides of the image.

Is Instagram killing the square format for mobile photography? Do you “Like” the new Instagram update? Let us know in the comments below.

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