Instagram is taking a five-year leap into the present as it now begins rolling out support for high-resolution images.
The Facebook-owned photo-sharing website first confirmed to The Verge that it has upgraded its servers to provide support for images with a resolution of 1,080 x 1,080 pixels.
A spokesperson tells the website that Instagram is "gradually rolling out 1,080 across iOS and Android," a move that started sometime last week. However, desktop users will not be seeing the improved images for now, as Instagram says that "right now we are focused on mobile, with no plans to share on web."
Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger also took to Twitter to announce the changes for its mobile apps.
We're rolling out 1080x1080 uploads (and higher-quality viewing) for IG on iOS and Android. Let me know if feed looks a bit sharper today :)
— Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) July 6, 2015
The change in resolution does not appear as bigger images onscreen. However, users will notice clearer, crisper photos with more details. Also, a look at the source code of Instagram shows images are now being saved in the 1,080 x 1,080 resolution, which means images are not simply being stretched to fill out the gap between 640 and 1,080 and appear bigger on wider screens. Instead, they are actually being uploaded as high-resolution images.
For five years since its inception, Instagram has been limiting images to a puny resolution of 640 x 640. That might have worked in 2010, when Instagram was a fledgling company and the hottest smartphone camera was the 5-megapixel iPhone 4. However, camera technology has grown exponentially since then and people can easily take high-resolution images with smartphones sporting top-of-the-line, new cameras.
It makes sense, therefore, for Instagram to catch up with the rest of the world and start offering support for images that can be captured with the cameras on the smartphones of 2015. With the upgrade, users can now take high-resolution images and share them on Instagram without the service crunching them down to 640 x 640, resulting in a loss of detail.
Instagram was founded in 2010 as a photo-sharing website where users can upload their photos and apply a number of filters for artistic presentation. The service quickly caught on, attracting the attention of Facebook, which purchased it for $1 billion in 2012. Instagram says it has 300 million monthly active users and 75 million users who use the website every day.
Photo: Esther Vargas | Flickr
