Instagram 7.5 removes ratio restriction, says it’s hip not to be square

If ever a social media service has proven that popularity matters more than functionality, Instagram pulled that off. While smartphone screens, cameras, and LTE access have vastly improved for most users, the image-sharing service had stuck to two archaic standards that turned most photographers' stomachs: a 640x640 resolution limit and a square-ratio restriction.

Complaints about both have raged for long enough that we figured Instagram had no intention of changing its ways, but this summer has seen Instagram address both. First came a silent 1080x1080 resolution upgrade discovered by The Verge in July, and that was followed on Thursday by a feature-change announcement tucked into the app's latest update. Now with the tap of version 7.5's "ratio" button, any previously snapped photo in your device's gallery will appear without an automatic crop to the service's default square ratio.

This change affects both image and video posts, and they'll appear within the updated version of the Instagram app at their full ratio. (Older-version users will see those images auto-shrunken to fit in a square.) There's a catch: those images must be captured by your smartphone's internal camera app. Should users shoot photos or videos within Instagram, however, they'll remain stuck in the square. While the update has gone live at both iOS' App Stores and Android's Google Play Store, we were only able to access the function on iOS as of press time.