10 things I hate about Instagram...

I used to love Instagram. Loved it to the point where I was nearly ready to be rid of Facebook altogether and just spend my browsing days scrolling through cool photos of my cool friends without any annoying ads or updates and friends I haven’t had the guts to delete.

Facebook bought Instagram for enough money to feed a few dozen small countries, and I hate to say it’s done what McDonald’s did to Georgie Pie. Nothing has really changed with Instagram itself, but the Instagram craze has cooled off and it’s becoming more and more irrelevant. Just like Facebook.

But, just like Facebook, even though you don’t use it as much as you once did, even though its glow is slowly wearing off, you’re still on it. You still post. You still check it on a regular basis. Even though there are several reasons, just like Facebook, that make you shake your phone it utter annoyance.

1. The filters:

It’s called an update, Instagram. The filters are getting uncooler by the day, yet Instagram is being a stubborn a-hole who won’t come up with some new options. Sometimes I will Instagram a picture twice just to get a different effect; it’s ridiculous. Sometimes I don’t use a filter at all because my original photo is better, because now the filters look so generic. Sort it out, guys.

2. The frames:

Not only does Instagram have no interest in adding to the filter options, they don’t seem to care about how ugly their frames are either. And while it is good you can choose if you want to use aor not, you don’t get to choose whatyou want. You have to go with the one that comes with the selected filter, and that sucks.

3. Stupid square photos:

I went to the Less than Jake concert a few weeks ago and managed to get this awesome photo of my friends and me. But because it was so dark I needed to add some super effects to make us look even cooler on our school night concert.

But Instagram makes you crop all your photos, and there was no way to crop the photo effectively unless one of my friends was fine with having half a face. Not happy. iPhones allow you to take excellent photos, so having to crop some of it out when you don’t want to is not cool.

4. Lack of editing options:

You can crop, add a filter, add aand make your photo blurry. And that’s it. That was fine when Instagram first came out and you could get carried away with using these options to make awesome combinations. But I’m done.

You can’t make any more new combinations and the awesomeness has worn off. To add a colour filter, or several frames within the one bigto show more than one photo, requires using a different app first and then uploading it to Instagram. I don’t know why they haven’t added more capabilities.

5. Crap photos:

People are getting slack. Because Instagram’s glow is getting rusty, people are getting complacent. People aren’t taking the time to post beautiful photos or fun photos. They’re posting anything.

Food pictures. And not food porn, just actual boring pictures of a pot with water in it. Or a bottle of wine. Or of your boring children. Now I know this might be a subjective topic. I’m sure people find my pictures of my dogs boring as hell. But hey, this is ten things I hate about Instagram, so too bad .

6. You can’t group who you’re following:

Whether you follow friends or famous people or companies or whatever, or a combination of all these, you can’t group them and divide up your feed. You’re stuck scrolling through your Instagram feed and seeing every single thing anyone you follow posts. This can be annoying.

Sometimes I don’t want to see celebrity posts, and I only want to see my actual friends pictures. It would be nice to be able to separate them.

7. The explore feature:

I don’t even know what this is for, really. Explore shows a collection of pictures that are popular right now, why these are popular, I have no clue. They are the dullest photos I have ever seen. Just because a photo has 200 likes doesn’t make it a better photo than one that has 20. It just means there are more people who have the same horrible taste as the person who posted it.

8. You can’t re-Instagram other people’s photos:

I don’t know if this is because of some copyright thing but it’s full on annoying. You can retweet until the cows come home and share pretty much everything on Facebook, so why can’t I share a cool snap someone I’m following has posted to my own followers?

Allowing the user to promote other people’s content encourages good content and will weed out all the crap stuff. We should be allowed to promote interesting photos to other users across the platform.

9. The map:

Too bad if you took your picture at the Sun Gate at Machu Piccu (I’ve been there, it’s awesome) but had to wait until you were back at home to access the internet. Your sweet picture with that lama tells your followers that you’re in fact at home in Hamilton.

10. Non integration with Twitter:

Unless you load a photo that’s already saved on your phone that you previously posted to Instagram, photo links for Instagram on Twitter redirect the user, rather than just showing the picture on Twitter itself. How unaccommodating.

You better make sure your caption is witty as hell so people are intrigued enough by that they click on the link, because they know doing so will route them away from Twitter to a webpage. Boo.

And one more for good measure...

11. So many steps:

Regardless if you’re editing or not, it takes a lot of work to post that picture to your feed. Once you open the app, it takes you to your feed, then you press the button to load a photo

More often than not you’re uploading a photo from your phone gallery rather than using the Instagram app to take a photo. Then you have to crop it to the stupid square. Then you go nuts with filters and frames and what have you. Then you write a caption. Then you choose if you want to share it on other platforms like on Facebook.

That’s a lot of stuff to do, especially if you don’t want to edit at all.