The social network is testing a new interface, very inspired by that of TikTok. With the key to the thorny question of the place that photos will take in the future.
Will the camera soon have to be replaced by a camera on the Instagram logo? This June 16, Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook and Instagram, announced that the photo history application was testing a new evolution of its main feed, with content now displayed in full screen. Faced with fierce competition from TikTok, Instagram thus seems determined to imitate its Chinese rival, in an attempt to keep its grip on young Internet users.
Advent of the vertical
If this experiment proved successful, Instagram would then offer three types of content: stories, at the top of the screen, Reels (short music videos similar to those of TikTok), then more “traditional” content, namely simple photos and videos, which we would therefore now see appear in full screen.
By adopting this strategy, Instagram would present all of its content in a vertical format, in order to match that of our smartphones. A format which is however far from being suitable for the vast majority of photos, taken in 16:9 or the more traditional 4:3 format.
The company makes no secret of its desire to favor video at the expense of photography. This objective was directly put forward by Adam Mosseri, in charge of the platform within the group of Mark Zuckerberg. In a video posted on May 3, he insisted that “video and messaging are the future of Instagram”.
In June 2021, Adam Mosseri already mentioned its teams’ priorities: creators, video, e-commerce and instant messaging, insisting that Instagram was no longer “a photo-sharing app”.
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This June 16, Mark Zuckerberg however mentioned the case of the photos, through a second Instagram story.
“Photos are still a big part of Instagram and we’re working on ways to improve how they can display full screen,” he said.
For his part, Adam Mosseri has already decided, estimating that the future of the photo on Instagram was the 9:16 format, the only one likely to fit perfectly into a smartphone screen held vertically.
For now, Instagram’s main thread is still capable of presenting snapshots as we have known them for many years, or even square format images.
But the company’s choices suggest two scenarios, which were probably never anticipated by photo enthusiast Kevin Systrom when he created the app more than a decade ago, before which it did. was acquired by Facebook in 2012.
A first scenario where the influence of Instagram would be sufficient to upset our habits, and encourage hundreds of millions of users to forget traditional panoramic photography in favor of vertical shots, or portraits.
There comes a second scenario, where the 9:16 format would not succeed in convincing, and where the photo would simply disappear little by little from the application, faced with the omnipotence of the video.
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