Meta have ruined Instagram. Again.

So I’ve been trying to post to instagram a bit more lately. I’ve been preparing images in Lightroom using my borders technique and then posting them using buffer to set up a routine. It had been going well. I was gathering similar images together and posting them in groups, as many photographers on instagram do. So imagine my surprise when I logged on this morning to find that meta have changed the way Instagram displays multiple images in a single post. And the change is horrible.

Previously, each image of a sequence would be full frame within the confines of a post, and you would have a series of dots to indicate the amount of images, and a set of controls to move between image to image. But now, instead of showing each image full screen, they overlap slightly in a very unsightly manner. This look absolutely horrible. It is shocking to me that anyone would think this is a good design. Even threads does this better.

The new way instagram displays multiple images in a post.

Threads kind of does something similar, except the way it displays images is much better. Here you still have the series of slides, but they are spaced out and when you tap on them you still see them full frame on their own.

How threads displays multiple images in a post.

Design wise, in my opinion, the way threads does it just looks much better

Here’s how the new instagram method looks in action…

Not only does the new instagram method look bad but it ruins many of the tricks photographers have used such as posting panoramas across multiple frame in a carousel or by having a framed shot as the first image and a full frame shot as the next.

So far the change seems to only be on the mobile version, with he web app still being the old way, but whether this stays this way or not remains to be seen. The last time they tried to make a horrible change like this they saw the error of their ways and put it back, so hopefully this aesthetic disaster will be short lived too. What do you think? Am I overreacting? Do you like this change?

If you hate this new design as much as I do, let them know by tagging instagram in a rant on threads ortwitter/x or whatever other way you can think of.