Squares Aren’t Everything

For years Instagram was just squares. Everything you wanted to share had to fit that format. Sunsets, feet, breakfast cereal, your whole visual life cropped and compressed into those equal sides. The square became so total you stopped thinking about it as a limitation. It was just how Instagram worked.

Today they released version 7.5 and now you can post in portrait and landscape. The official statement was something about how the square will always matter but your visual story comes first. Which is them basically admitting they got it wrong.

I spent years learning to see in squares. There’s something valuable about constraints—they teach you composition, force certain choices. But most photographs don’t belong in squares. A landscape should breathe. A vertical line should extend. The actual world isn’t built in equal four-sided boxes.

The people who are happy about this are probably the ones who’ve been frustrated by it the longest. Photographers who need negative space. Anyone capturing something wide. The format change won’t make pictures better on its own, but it lets them be what they actually are instead of what Instagram demanded.

It’s a small thing, constraints finally becoming optional. But it matters more than it sounds like it should.