One out of every five photos or videos on Instagram show up with whitespace around them because people use other apps to make their landscape or portrait imagery fit in Instagram’s square cropping.
That’s why Instagram for iOS and Android is dropping the requirement that all photos and videos be squares. Now when you upload photos, they can pinch or tap a format button on the left to post your landscape or portrait photos and videos. Squares are still allowed too.
The change could change artistic expression in Instagram. Traditionally shot landscape videos won’t lose their cinematic feel. Fashion photographers have constantly complained about how squares forced them to crop out the shoes from portrait shots of people’s outfits.
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And for regular users like you and I, the change means we won’t have to plan ahead to post to Instagram, or end up cropping out friends’ faces from group photos.
Another extra bit of information that comes with the new update - filters on Instagram are now “universal” which means you can use photo filters on videos and video filters on photos.
Every other thing will still pretty much remain the same. However, images will still show up as squares in user profiles.
