Everything in Boxes

Since Instagram launched, every photo had to be a square. Your coffee, your cat, a sunset over the water—all forced into the same rigid crop. You could spend twenty minutes adjusting the filter, obsessing over brightness and contrast, and none of it changed the one fundamental fact: the frame was always a square, and always would be.

Until version 7.5. The update rolled out this week and quietly killed the format requirement—portrait and landscape are now both fair game. Instagram addressed it on their official blog with characteristic corporate warmth: The square format has been and always will be a part of who we are, they wrote, but we know that it’s just as important to us that your visual stories are told in the format that you choose.

Diplomatic. What they actually mean is that forcing every photo into a square was a weird aesthetic constraint that never made much sense outside of a Polaroid. Long objects, wide buildings, beach horizons—they never really wanted to be squares. Now they don’t have to be. The only consequence is that you’ll need to tidy up more of your apartment before you photograph that artfully arranged bowl of breakfast cereal.