Instagram has rolled out a new update to its mobile app that allows you to select either a landscape and portrait orientation when you share multiple photos and videos in a single post. The Facebook-owned photo sharing platform announced via its official Twitter account that the new feature is now available to download from the Google Play Store for all Instagram users. The new feature is intended to improve how you share photos and videos, drifting away from the previous restriction of 1:1 aspect ratio for multimedia content. That means images you share on Instagram are no longer limited to the square shape, but can take other aspect ratios depending on the suitable orientation of the photo or video.
In February of this year, Instagram also introduced changes to its service that allowed users to upload as many as ten photos and videos to the platform at once, raising the number of content you can share with friends from the previous limitation of one image per post. That feature is meant to help users let their friends know about new places they have visited, for example, or sift through the album of photos about food and beverages. Instagram users were (in the past) forced to change the aspect ratio of photos and videos to square since these multimedia content have different dimensions. As a result, some important details of an image are sometimes cropped out once its aspect ratio has been converted to 1:1. That is no longer the case, though.
Instagram’s latest move is part of a wider effort to increase its user base, which currently stands at more than 700 million. Some of the more recent improvements to the app were rolled out in June, which included the ability to re-share live videos to Instagram Stories. That update helped to retain live videos after they have ended instead of having them disappear forever. Around the same time, Instagram also introduced the Archive feature to its service, allowing everyone to remove a post from public view, while keeping it saved on Instagram for later viewing. In May, Instagram also revamped its mobile website to let users upload photos on the go if doing so with the platform’s mobile app is not practical at a given time.