When you scroll through your Instagram feed today, you might have to keep scrolling… and scrolling…
There’s a new glitch that allowed people post extra-long images onto their feeds. It’s attention-grabbing for pretty obvious reasons: they take a while to scroll past. Instagram normally limits portrait photos to roughly the size of your screen.
The glitch appears to have only worked on iOS. To make it work, you basically just created or saved an extra-long image, then opened up Instagram’s photo picker and selected it. The app seems to have failed to properly crop them.“WE’RE AWARE OF A BUG INVOLVING OVERSIZED PHOTOS ON INSTAGRAM.”
People started to notice the glitch on Wednesday. Shortly after publication of this story, Instagram seems to have fixed the issue. Many people now say they get a server error when they attempt to post the long images, preventing the pictures from publishing onto their feed.
“We’re aware of a bug involving oversized photos on Instagram. We’re working quickly to fix the issue,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in an email to The Verge.
Even when it was working, the glitch came with some limitations. Images that were too long seemed to not work or to turn up all black. Some images were also cut off and appeared really pixelated. This wasn’t quite a chance to post a full-res scan of a beautiful banner you made.
On Android, Instagram continued cropping images properly, so you weren’t able to post them. The images do still show up extra-long in your feed, though, so you can see what others are posting.
This is almost certainly a glitch and not a new feature, so it was unlikely to stick around for long. For now, it’s quickly being picked up by influencers and meme accounts as a novel way to grab people’s attention on the app. We’ve reached out to Instagram for comment.
So what does this actually look like?
