From your slice of pizza to your new puppy, Instagram lets you share snapshots and videos of your life. Since the photo-sharing site debuted in 2010, users could post images and videos only in the same square shape. But last year, Instagram broke out of the box: Now, you can post media in portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) orientations too.
Instagrammers use different aspect ratios to post in these new shapes. The aspect ratio is the relationship between the height and the width of an image. To fit Instagram’s strict 1:1 (or square) aspect ratio, users had to crop, or trim, the edges of their photos. The new range of ratios means they don’t have to crop as much, so they can share shots of subjects tall (redwood trees) and wide (the Grand Canyon).
Popular Instagrammer Melissa Hie likes to test out different aspect ratios before she posts. She then picks the one that brings out the best in her subjects. Hie has about 335,000 followers on her professional account, @girleatworld, where she posts pictures of foods she’s eating at famous landmarks around the world. She also has over 4,000 followers on her personal account, @ichabunni.
“On my personal Instagram, I’ve been experimenting with the different orientations,” says Hie. “I’ve found that some pictures are perfect for the portrait shape, as it brings out more details.”
Instagram has made it easy to change the ratio of photos and videos, and users like the variety. Now, nearly 20 percent of posts are not square. And that’s a lot of posts: The app’s users post more than 80 million photos each day!
But even with this new “ratio freedom,” users aren’t giving up on the square—Hie included. “I like to have consistency on my Instagram,” she says, “so on my professional account I keep my photos in the square format.”