Instagram Improves Direct Messaging With Threaded Convos and Enhanced Emojis

Instagram has announced a set of improvements to its direct messaging feature, which included threaded conversations and enhanced emojis Instagram Direct has garnered 85 million monthly users since launching in 2013, but the service was never on par with direct messaging offered by competitors like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter. Today,

Instagram is introducing much needed threaded conversations. That means you don’t have to create a new conversation with someone every time you want to DM them a new photo. Now you can just drop in a photo as though you were sending a text message and keep the conversation going. In addition, Direct now has a quick camera feature for replying with a selfie, and there is a new ability for sending gigantic emojis.

An update to the main feed will allow you to send content from your timeline as a direct message. This feature was inspired by the growing trend of users tagging other users in comments as a way to share a photo with them. According to the company, nearly 40% of comments include an @-mention.

Users can now share content directly with others by tapping on the new arrow that appears next to the like and comment buttons. This will allow you to share the post as a DM. These updates to Instagram are now available on both iOS and Android. Editorial Credit: 10 FACE / Shutterstock.com

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Instagram Landscape and Portrait Mode Are Here! Third-Party Apps No Longer Needed

Instagram just introduced one of its most significant changes in recent memory — landscape and portrait modes for photos and videos. In addition to the traditional square photos, Instagram now natively allows the ability to post media in portrait and landscape orientations. This means you can post your photos and videos as they were originally shot.

No more cropping videos that you shot in widescreen, or selfies you took in portrait mode. According to the company, nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format. With the help of third-party apps Instagram users have been able to accomplish posting media without cropping it.

With today’s update, it sounds like those third-party apps are destined to become obsolete. The company admits, “we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram”, but now that problem has been fixed. Here’s how it works: Choose a photo or video Tap the brand new format icon on the bottom left to adjust the orientation. Choose your filters, and so on. Once shared, the full-sized versions of your media in landscape and portrait format will appear in a much more natural way than it would have before with a third-party app.

On your profile screen the photo grid will remain square — any media that’s not natively square will appear as a center-cropped square. In addition, all filters can now be used for all types of media. There’s no longer filters just for photos and filters just for videos. Those are two major changes in one day that are sure to change the landscape (pun intended) of Instagram for the foreseeable future. Widescreen video opens up a lot of new opportunities.

Even when using third-party apps in the past, rendering and uploading widescreen video was a terribly tiresome process. Now it sounds like it will be just like uploading any other video. With this update you can check ‘landscape/portrait mode’ off the list of most wanted Instagram features. Next, it would likely please a lot of people if the app offered a native re-gram feature. Editorial Credit: tulpahn / Shutterstock.com

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