Instagram has announced a new policy to try and prevent the spread of imagery that is harmful to wildlife. When an individual attempts to view images that have certain hashtags, this will result in a warning entitled “Protect Wildlife on Instagram” which explains that they should be aware that the hashtag may “be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals or the environment.”
Instagram has now relaxed their rules regarding aspect ratios and users can now share photos and videos in both portrait and landscape orientation. In order to do so, there is now a format icon that allows users to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square. Once the image or video are shared, the full-sized version of it will appear in follower’s feed.
National Geographic has posted part 1 of an article entitled “So You Want to be Successful on Instagram” on its Voices blog. The post asserts that Instagram has “become the social network for visual people” and emphasizes how crucial it is for photographers to get their work on it. Equally, the author Kike Calvo also recognizes the difficulty in getting images seen given the sheer volume of postings.
Instagram has surpassed Twitter with 300 million registered users. Instagram is the image sharing app that has become increasingly popular in the last few years. The company has reported that users share 70 million photos and videos to the app every single day. It has certainly become one of the new places for photographers to interact with one another.
Wetpixel is now on Instagram under the username Wetpixelgram. We launched our account at DEMA 2013 and can’t wait to get some underwater photos up. So, please follow us and tag #Wetpixel or @Wetpixelgram in your underwater images.