Aug 27, 20152 min read

Instagram Moves Beyond The Square & A Few Brands Test The Waters

It’s hip to be beyond square. Or something like that.

Instagram, the visual social network with the famously rigid equal-sided format, announced today that it’s now allowing people to post rectangular photos and videos, in either landscape and portrait orientation.

“It turns out that nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format, and we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram: friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end,” Instagram wrote in a blog post. “Now, when choosing a photo or video, you can tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square. Once you share the photo, the full-sized version of it will appear to all of your followers in feed in a beautiful, natural way. To keep the clean feel of your profile grid, your post will appear there as a center-cropped square.”

The update, available on the iOS and Android apps today, also enables the use of the same filters on both photos and videos.

The change is good news, especially for marketers and brands that use creative material across multiple social platforms. Now it would be great if only Instagram would consider allowing regramming, linking out from posts, uploading from the desktop and playing nicely with Twitter, to mention a few of our quibbles about the service that we love.

We put the call out for examples of brands trying out the new feature. So far, only a few have taken advantage of the extra space. Here are a few: