The Instagram test involves tall 9:16 aspect ratio photos that fill the entire screen of your iPhone as you scroll through the feed in the Meta-owned app.
- What is happening? Instagram has confirmed that it will soon start testing much taller 6:19 aspect ratio photos that would fill the screen in the feed.
- Why care? Instagram is desperately trying to become more like TikTok, the most recent example of which is the controversial TikTok-style fullscreen navigation with tall videos. This new test is not about those changes. Instead, it’s an attempt to integrate full screen photos along with square photos into your feed.
- What to do? If you hate Instagram’s relentless copying of TikTok’s approach to mobile media, pray. While Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has backed away from TikTok’s recent styling changes in terms of its full-screen design and guidelines, the setback is not permanent – the company hopes to move to full-screen mobile video after it improves its algorithms.
Instagram is testing tall photos
According to The Verge, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently confirmed the new test during his weekly Ask Me Anything poll. “You can have tall videos, but you can’t have tall Instagram photos,”he said. “So we thought maybe we should make sure we treat both equally.”Tall photos with a 9:16 aspect ratio will start appearing on the platform for a small number of users “in a week or two.”
Instagram currently supports 4:5 aspect ratio vertical images that don’t fill the screen as you scroll through the feed (as mentioned, the full-screen design, which forces all feed photos to appear in a 9:16 frame, was pulled after mounting criticism). People disliked Instagram’s TikTok-ification, to the point that Mosseri admitted that Instagram’s own data shows people are spending less time on the app because they don’t like the changes.
“I think we need to take a big step back, regroup and figure out how we want to move forward,”he told The Verge. Mosseri has made it clear that the company will continue to improve its recommendation algorithms to include more content that people will enjoy. And since users do have a demand for short videos, don’t expect Instagram to give up trying to become more like TikTok anytime soon.