Instagram is a Terrible Image-Sharing Platform (for artists)
Posted 5/02/2025

As someone who has primarily used Instagram to share my art since 2017, I’ve had plenty of time to notice all of the ways in which it sucks. But don’t worry! Even though it sucked in 2017, it has only gotten worse by 2025.

A disclaimer for this blog post is that I am speaking as a digital artist. I realize that instagram was made specifically for sharing photos. But I am labeling it generally as an image sharing platform so I have more excuses to be mad at it but also because it is currently one of the largest social media platforms ever and almost ALL of its competitors have better image sharing capabilities.

The first thing I wanna touch on is AI. I will say that if you’re posting anything anywhere, you’re not safe from being AI training fodder. And I don’t personally give a shit if I am. However, pretty much every other artist I know does, and Mark Zuckerberg is investing HARDCORE in genAI. On Instagram you will get AI chat bots advertised to you as you scroll, as you try to search, and as you try to comment. They even made AI generated profiles (based on random celebrities for some reason) that you can chat with that post AI generated images. Instagram can and will use your posts for AI training and they won’t let you opt out of it unless they legally have to. Oh well!

A pettier gripe I have is the image quality is horrendously bad. Ok, granted, it seems to have gotten a lot better. It used to absolutely destroy the quality of any art I posted there. But still, there is no option to control what quality your image is posted in. It will always be a cropped and resized JPEG. This is forgivable, most platforms reduce image quality to some extent, but I swear every other social media platform- even on mobile- lets you at least view images in full screen and zoom in for higher quality. Instagram doesn’t! There’s barely a zoom-in feature at all. You can manually pinch to make the image bigger on your screen but it stays the same quality, so if your image is large at all you’re losing a lot of precious details. I know I’m not the only one who finds this annoying because I see a lot of artists post separate, zoomed-in views of their drawings so people can actually see the details. As a lazy person, that sucks. I don’t wanna do that.

Another reason people need to post separate views of their art on instagram is the very limited aspect ratio. Again, there’s no ‘view full image’ feature, and in order to have a stylish cohesive app without that feature they made it so you can only post squares or nearly-square rectangles. I’ve been fucked over by this cropping many times. I’ve also remade things into squares for Instagram many times. Smarter artists with more followers than me have gotten used to drawing instagram-optimized square images to avoid cropping problems and have pretty thumbnails on their profiles. Which makes it especially infuriating that instagram image thumbnails are no longer square! They’re now a 3x4 rectangle. I can only assume they did this so that instagram reels (which are always portrait mode and allowed to be much taller than normal image posts) look better on people’s profiles.

Instagram reels pretty much marked the end of instagram as an “image sharing platform” anyway, so I guess I shouldn’t be judging it as one. The majority of the content the average person looks at during an instagram doomscroll will be reels. Reels reels reels. The content equivalent of junk food. At least withTikTok I was safe from the brainrot by just not downloading the app, but I had built a following (well… not much of one…) on Instagram before it became TikTok 2. And now I’m just stuck. Being a TiktTok user on a different app. The plague of vertical, short-form, endless scrolling content. And the worst part is? I don’t even use it to my advantage because I’m too lazy to make video content. At least animation memes are back– but that’s not me! If my art can’t do well on any of the popular social apps how am I meant to make moneyyyyy!!!!!!!!???????

Anyway, hit that like button if you hate instagram.

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