Instagram finally drops square picture rules to embrace rectangular photos

It's no longer hip to be square, as Instagram adds portrait and landscape options to its upload service

By Rhiannon Williams 27 August 2015 • 6:01pm

Instagram's new landscape and portrait modes provode users with a greater variety of framing options

Instagram is expanding its horizons to include a choice of portrait and landscape formats for uploading pictures and videos for the first time.

The picture sharing app previously only employed a distictive square framing method, meaning users often had to closely crop their images before uploading.

The move is in response to user demand for more framing variety, and is also intended to encourage users to shoot more video content.

Hopefully there will be an instagram update that will let u upload the full original pic. W/o square cropping or instasizing it lol.
— Dominic Holmes (@sherlock_dom_) August 27, 2015

Mentally having to calculate what a picture looks like in square proportions so that later it looks good on Instagram #firstworldproblems
— Ankur Banerjee (@ankurb) August 21, 2015

Always too tall for the Instagram square
— Kellie Stewart (@kelliemelissa18) August 25, 2015

Apple introduced a square aspect ratio shooting mode in iOS 7 in what was seen as an obvious tailoring to the needs of Instagram users, who upload an average of 70 million photos a day.

Nearly one in five photos or videos posted currently aren't in the square format, leaving wide borders of white space, Instagram said.

While the photo automatically uploads as square, tapping the format icon provides a choice to keep the photo in its original orientation instead of cropping it to a square

Tapping the new format icon in the lower left-hand corner when uploading a picture allows users to choose between square, portrait and landscape orientations.