Instagram is Now Hiding Photoshopped Photos | PetaPixel

https://petapixel.com …ding-photoshopped-photos/

After all these years, I've finally closed down my Instagram account. I probably should have done it when Facebook bought them.

I for one am grateful that big brother protected me from that misleading image, If it weren't for the "fact checkers" I would have been duped into believing that there was a vacation spot with rainbow colored hills! thank you Instagram!

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garryknight wrote in post #18991356
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Instagram is Now Hiding Photoshopped Photos
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Well that's a shame.

Many people use Instagram not to show real-life photos, but also to show their artwork, which often includes digital art in the form of highly manipulated photographic images. . Photoshopping photos is the type of art that many people do. . Why would Instagram want to keep people from being able to share this type of artwork?
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garryknight wrote in post #18991356
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After all these years, I've finally closed down my Instagram account.
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I've done the opposite. . I just started an Instagram account about 13 months ago, and I absolutely love it!

Many of my wildlife photography friends had been telling me for years that I should get on Instagram, but I couldn't figure out how to start an account until December of 2018. . Now that I'm on there I realized how much I missed during those years that I didn't have it. . It's one of the few things that has literally changed my life, for the better.


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SOme of the comments on the story re pretty funny. I LOL at the filter killing Peter Lik's business.

Will this kill off HDR Tone mapping abominations!?

I really wish there was a better alternative to Instagram.

Instagram was fun when it started. A new way of taking photos, processing them, and sharing them. Then people started taking the photos with their DSLRs and processing them in Photoshop. And this simply wasn't (back then) what Instagram was about. Then Facebook bought Instagram, and it was just a matter of time before it got too bad to stay there.

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I guess we're all different, and we all want different things out of Instagram.

Instagram isn't for "fun", nor is it just a way to pass some downtime enjoyably. . It is a serious research tool to be exploited for finding photographic venues and connecting with other wildlife photographers so that I can get information from them.
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garryknight wrote in post #18991481
Instagram was fun when it started. A new way of taking photos, processing them, and sharing them.

I had no interest in that Instagram at all. . Cellphone pics that people share right after taking them are of no use to me in my wildlife research.
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garryknight wrote in post #18991481
Then people started taking the photos with their DSLRs and processing them in Photoshop.

This is why Instagram is so valuable to me now. . I am able to see the photos that good photographers are able to get with their high-end gear, and that shows me what kinds of photographic opportunities I can expect to find when I visit various locations throughout the U.S. to photograph wildlife.

I know that Facebook has always had a bunch of useful information posted to it ... but I hate the user interface so much that I find it loathsome to use. . Sometimes I know that the info I need is on Facebook, but finding that info is so hard because the UI forces me to search through all kinds of useless crap before I can get to the thing I am looking for.

With Instagram the way it is now, I can get directly to what I need in a matter of seconds.


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Tom Reichner wrote in post #18991505
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I am able to see the photos that good photographers are able to get with their high-end gear, and that shows me what kinds of photographic opportunities I can expect to find when I visit various locations throughout the U.S. to photograph wildlife.


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I use to use Flickr that way. I had some scripts that would query tags, date taken (after a certain date so I could look at recent data) and location. I could display the results on a map and see where I was most likely to see different types of wildlife.

I dumped Facebook about 2 years ago as there was just too much political crap and went to Instygram. I like it becayse it's:
1. What were eating.
2. Where are we at.
3. Pics of the kids
4. What are we are doing.
5. and I'm seeing something interesting.

And that's about it. But then I don't follow any of the influencers, just family.

This is aimed at memes. They are powerful tools to tell stories with, that bypass their censorship programs since they cannot read the image itself. Social media has always been a tool for shaping the narrative, and they only want their own, or their advertisers, shared.

Capn Jack wrote in post #18991539
I use to use Flickr that way. I had some scripts that would query tags, date taken (after a certain date so I could look at recent data) and location. I could display the results on a map and see where I was most likely to see different types of wildlife.

Yes, I did too! . And I found some good leads on Flickr.

But, Flickr just doesn't even come close to Instagram for this type of use. . For one thing, Flickr is rather cumbersome to use. . It takes several, sometimes even many, seconds for pages to load. . When I'm clicking on 10 or 15 different things every minute, I simply can't wait 4 or 5 seconds for each thing to load. . That makes my research take two or three times as long as it would with instant pageloads.

For another thing, the nation's foremost wildlife photographers aren't active on Flickr. . Flickr seems to be mostly used by hobbyists. . If I want to talk to the nations most successful waterfowl photographers, I can get right to them on Instagram and be exchanging personal messages within minutes. . Ditto for the nation's most successful Deer or Elk photographers, songbird photographers, etc. . These people aren't even on Flickr at all.

With Instagram I can get right to many of the best wildlife photographers in the world, and have them respond to DMs within a short time, and answer my detailed questions. . Often times they even want to meet up and shoot together if we're going to be in the same area at the same time. . That kind of super-efficient research just doesn't happen with Flickr.

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Having used Facebook for over 15yrs, I've seen it change from a way to connect with people you might never have otherwise met, to now a way to check up on people you avoid in real life. Made even worse in recent years by the mind boggling number of advertisements you have to sort through while scrolling through a newsfeed that Facebook decided was relevant for you rather than displaying the most recent or most engaging posts. There are exceptions to this rule, but I think the sentiment holds true for the users who were there from the beginning stages.

I like Instagram a bit better, but I think it's because of how I developed my account by only following strangers with similar interest, and the occasional athlete or celebrity. I don't follow friends, family, or the random dude I talked to for 30sec at a college party 20yrs ago.

But I digress... Instagram hiding certain photos that are heavily edited is quite the slippery slope. A supposedly "progressive" company censoring art but allowing political content (paid or otherwise) is hypocrisy at its finest.

I never photoshoped my images. Got published and such without it.
I never used Insta for real. Tried it and it was not for my viewing standards. Good for mobile phone viewers, seagulls experience like "like,like,like" as it was originally implemented. Photoshoped or not, it just dumb to look at photos at tiny screen resolution. IMO.

Facebook is now better, they are not over compressing images as they used to be. And I could post normal size and not just chopped to square by default, just because some IT geek liked it.

I've never posted anything to Instagram that did not first make a trip through PS. So far, nothing has been flagged.

Given the extreme disinclination of FB empire nodes to act as responsible publishers, I'd be shocked if this went much further than some nice PetaPixel click bait.