So I started an Instagram. Dunno what I'm gonna do with it. Started it just to figure out how it works, what the hype is, if it has any advantages or usefulness…
And after being on it for one day, I'm finding so many shortcomings that I wonder if I'll even bother posting more than the one test foto that's already there.
1. I find it laughable and embarrassing that Instagram doesn't support 16:9 widescreen fotos. What do they gain by forcing everything into square images? Every foto and video that I take is in big ol' widescreen (or bigger = panorama). It seems that the primary recommendation as a work-around is to use a free app called Squareready, where you can make sure your fotos aren't cropped and post them to Instagram in their original widescreen (or any other) aspect ratio. That's what I did, and it worked fine.
Also, is there a way to view pictures posted to Instagram in their original dimensions? I have just a regular 15" laptop, but if I click on a foto which is originally 4000x2248 (as pretty much all my fotos are, unless it's a frame grab from one of my videos, in which case it's still 1920x1080), I expect it to fill pretty much my entire screen. Can't seem to find a way to do that, which is a significant mark against it. If nothing else, is there a way to download fotos in their original size (as you can in FB)?
2. Why do they make it such a pain in the ass to post fotos taken by some camera other than my phone? Why can't I upload fotos directly from my computer? I have an iphone 4, and if you don't know, the camera on that phone is garbage. (Never mind that I'm wi-fi only, so the vast majority of the time, the phone isn't even connected to the internet anyway.) So I'll never post any fotos that I take with that camera. Anything that I post will have been shot on my Canon handheld and transferred to my computer and processed in DxO Optics. So after that I'll need to transfer the foto to my phone first in order to post it to Instagram? Do they not have a desktop version?
3. Is there anything I can accomplish with Instagram that I can't with FB or Ello? Does Instagram do anything better than FB or Ello? Does Intsagram have foto albums or groupings the way FB and Flickr do?
4. As you can see from some of my blog posts, I don't hesitate to write exhaustive, sometimes overly-long posts (like this one!). Which is kinda weird, because personally, I'm very much an introvert and really barely talk at all. But this is one of the reasons I dumped my Twitter, with their famous 140 character limit. And now I see that Instagram has a slightly more generous 300 character limit. At least FB got a clue some years ago and upped their limit from 256 to the current 63,206 characters per post limit. I grew tired of posting something to Twitter and only being able to write 'go to my blog to get the complete details for this' with the direct link. And I'm not gonna bother posting anything to Instagram if I'm forced to do the same thing. Sometimes my blog posts are very short and to the point. But there are other times when I like to explain stuff and those explanations will undoubtedly exceed 300 characters by a significant number.
Then again, Instagram posts differ from regular Wordpress Tumblr Blogspot posts, yes? Instagram isn't a blog, per se. It's just a repository for fotos. That's fine, but why would I bother with Instagram if FB and Ello (and Wordpress and Tumblr and Blogspot) do the same thing, but better?
So follow me on Instagram or not. Still don't know whether I'll be bothered to post to it or not.
In the meantime, here's a picture of a wasp-
