is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Have you tried simply uploading a photo to Instagram lately? It’s a minefield. Is that a Story, a Post, or a Reel? Do you want to add music? A caption? A prompt, which is… different than a caption, somehow? How about a poll? A fundraiser? More text, but this time on top of the image? Share it to Facebook? On and on and on. I have a simple request to anyone at Meta who is listening: please, just give us our photo sharing app back.
The current Instagram app is more like three or four apps in a trenchcoat. There’s the grid, which is probably what anyone over the age of 35 thinks of as Instagram. Then there’s Stories — shamelessly copied from Snapchat — which I’ll admit I enjoy. There’s also Reels, which is where you can watch short videos a week after they were big on TikTok.
The current Instagram app is more like three or four apps in a trenchcoat
When you post your first Reel, you’re prompted to add it to your Stories because Meta just can’t help itself. Instagram is constantly trying to funnel you into engaging with different features that have been bolted onto the app over the past decade. Want to use that iPad Instagram app you’ve been waiting over a decade for? Well, you’re gonna have to look at Reels first. Want to search for something on Instagram? You can’t; you have to ask Meta AI. There are entirely too many Experiences happening inside Instagram, and it drives me bananas.
As a little social experiment, I uploaded a photo to Instagram and enabled as many of these features as I could. I put text on top of the image, overlaid another image, added a suggested song, applied a filter, tweaked the lighting, used Meta AI to rewrite my caption into a prompt, and tried adding a poll that somehow didn’t make it to the final post. It’s hard to know what went wrong when there are upward of a dozen other options to toggle on or off in the process. I stopped short of adding a fundraiser, because that seems like a gross thing to do for a bit. The final post is unbearable, and importantly, it’s no longer a photo: it is Content, with a capital C.
Instagram may have been a simple photo sharing app at one point, but that changed long ago. Today, it’s a platform for Content. Why post a photo when you can turn it into an opportunity for engagement? Instagram wants us all to imagine ourselves as the content creators of our own little lives, prompting our followers to like, comment, and subscribe. You want to post a picture of your kid at the beach and add a song to play alongside it? Fine, I love that for you. I’d rather not personally, but that hasn’t stopped Instagram from shoving its app full of these opportunities to adorn your photos in the name of engagement.
There’s a way to age gracefully, and then there’s a Meta app
I have a free idea for Meta: give us back our simple photo sharing experience. It doesn’t even have to be a separate app. It can be a mode. Call it “elder millennial mode” or something. We’re old enough to remember uploading a photo, adding a filter, and calling it a day. We want that again! I don’t want to soundtrack every photo I put on my grid. I don’t very much care to use AI to write and rewrite a prompt to encourage my followers to engage with my post. I just want to put up a dang picture.
Look, I get that any app that’s been around as long as Instagram will have to adapt as times and tastes change. I don’t post the way I did 10 years ago, when seemingly any random thing I saw on the sidewalk was worthy of a spot on the grid. I’d put that picture in my Stories now, where a handful of people would see it before it disappeared into the ether, which I think is an improvement. But there’s a way to age gracefully, and then there’s a Meta app — bloated with all the greatest hits of the last decade’s efforts to keep you scrolling through the feed. Given the number of times I open the Instagram app every day, I guess the joke’s on me. I just wish that sharing a photo felt more like sharing a photo and not so much like publishing Content.
