Dear Instagram, Please Add These Crucial Features
Dear Instagram,
Much love from the bottom of my heart. I love the platform you’ve provided for photographers to share their work and reach a broader audience. It has provided so many opportunities for me personally: from connecting with other creators to getting my work seen by a broader audience. But, we have to talk. The truth is, while you’ve come a long way from your humble beginnings, there are definitely some things you can improve too.
NEW FEATURES
First of all, I wanna say I love Instagram’s drive to innovate and redesign its app. The introduction of new features such as Stories and Live Video have all been awesome steps forward. Hell, I even like the save feature that a lot of people have been ragging on. All that being said, there are a few things I would really love to see in Instagram’s near future. So, here we go.
CROPPING
Alright, let’s address the elephant in the room: the 4x5 vertical crop. I think it’s great that Instagram has moved away from “square only” photos to allow 3x2 horizontal and 4x5 vertical cropping. But why stop at 4x5? I would love to be able to post full-sized vertical 2x3 photographs! For a portrait photographer who shoots mostly vertical images and wants to post his work without compromising the original image size, this would be a huge improvement!
I think it’s great that Instagram has moved away from “square only” photos to allow 3x2 horizontal and 4x5 vertical cropping. But why stop at 4x5?
The current 4x5 aspect ratio cropping often ruins the aesthetic of my photographs and this prevents me from posting them on Instagram. When I shoot portraits, my framing and composition is intentional. So to have to make decisions about what to crop and what to keep when I’m uploading to Instagram just adds an unnecessary layer of confusion to the process. Please, just give us the ability to post full vertical 2x3 photographs! It would be a dramatic improvement and easy to implement.
REAL GALLERIES
An Instagram profile serves as a portfolio for many professional and amateur photographers these days. It’s where the most people consume our imagery. It’s also the first point of access for many potential clients and collaborators. So it would be awesome if Instagram gave photographers the ability to organize our work into galleries. The multi-image post feature was a step forward, but it didn’t address the inability for photographers and creators to present their work in an organized way.
Galleries would be a huge boost to photographers who shoot multiple styles of imagery.
I create a variety of architectural photography and portraiture. But I stopped posting cityscape photos on my Instagram account so that I could let my portrait work shine and give my feed a cohesive look. If I could organize my work into galleries, similar to Facebook and 500px, then I wouldn’t have stopped posting cityscapes altogether.
DM INBOX SEARCH
I appreciate the recent redesign of the direct messaging inbox. It’s much cleaner and easier to use, but there are still some other features that could take it to the next level. Introducing a search bar to allow for keyword searching, much like email, would make it way easier to find old message chains.
I have hundreds of messages in my DM inbox at this point, so it can be really tricky to locate a past conversation that I want to revisit.
Some additional sorting and filtering options would be useful as well. Imagine if you could sort messages by the sender’s name or filter to only show group messages. This would greatly improve the functionality of Instagram direct messaging, which has become such a huge function of how I interact with other creators and coordinate projects.
CONCLUSION — MUCH LOVE
I want to reiterate that all these suggestions come from a place of love. Instagram has given photographers a platform to connect with other creators and find new audiences in ways that were not possible even a few years ago. I am grateful for that. I want to see Instagram continue to grow and evolve and I think the changes I suggested in this open letter can dramatically improve the experience.
Sincerely,
Dan Bullman
