An Instagram spokesperson says this is a ‘limited test.’ The ‘vast majority’ of Instagram uploads feature vertical content, according to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.
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Instagram is testing a potentially major change to profile pages: making the squares in your profile grid vertical rectangles. Some users recently spotted the test, and there have been indications from at least 2022 that the company has toyed with a rectangular grid.
“The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical,” Mosseri says in an Instagram story from Friday discussing the test. “It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal.”
Mosseri notes that “squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram,” a limitation Instagram removed all the way back in 2015. Mosseri also knows that this profile change might be annoying for people who have spent a lot of time “curating and making sure everything lines up” but says that “I would really like to do better by the content today.”
“We’re testing a vertical profile grid with a small number of people,” Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai says in a statement to The Verge. “This is a limited test, and we’ll be listening to feedback from the community before rolling anything out further.”
Still, if you’ve meticulously planned out your profile grid around squares, you might want to prepare for those squares to someday change into rectangles.
Here’s a transcription of Mosseri’s story:
We’re actually testing a vertical grid, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, for your profile, instead of squares. Now, squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram. I know this can be annoying for some of you who really spent a lot of time curating and making sure everything lines up, but I would really like to do better by the content today. The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical. It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal. So, I’m hoping we can figure out a way to manage this transition.
