The Ongoing Afterthought of Instagram’s Web Client

(and how it underwhelms the spectacularity of your photographs)

I’m one of those who prefer looking at Instagram in a Web-browser. Photos can strut their stuff on a big, bright screen, freed from the infinite thumb-scroll and relatively small displays of phones or tablets.

When I’m looking at photos, I want to see everything, but when viewing Instagram on a desktop/laptop, the 640x640 size limit on Instagram.com really puts the hurt on great photos. Take this, for example.

It’s a post from @motionexposure, whose work I found thanks to the new Photoviz book. Here’s the full-size version that Instagram renders for its web platform. (It’s re-sized above by Medium to be about 10% smaller, fwiw.)

Instagram renders the width at 478 pixels, the height at 597. Pretty small. Can you even tell those are maple leafs, if you hadn’t seen the caption?

If you embed the Instagram link here on Medium, the image is presented in a larger embed window, with captions at the bottom (& no conversation, phew!) with the image at 700-w x 939-h. Getting there; but it’s better because we’re no longer viewing an Instagram photo on Instagram’s own platform.