Instagram has become the defining social network of our generation when it comes to image sharing. The cultural relevance and popularity of the application was such that the social networking giant, Facebook, invested USD 1billion to acquire the service. Through all of this, the company has stuck to the somewhat antiquated low resolution images that it launched with. This is about to change.
Looking through the source URLs on Instagram pages indicates that the company is about to increase the resolution dramatically. Where uploads were stuck to an archaic 640px, you’ll now be looking at 1080px wide images. This means that your embeds are going to look a lot crisper and will pack a lot more detail. We’re still not sure if Instagram is planning to fix the issue with compression artifacts on Android devices but this alone is a step in the right direction. While Full HD Android devices have been around for a while, the emergence of an Apple iPhone packing a high resolution display seems to be the impetus here to increase the resolution. We expect Instagram to switch over to high resolution embeds soon enough as it appears that all uploads are now in the higher resolution and said images can be accessed via direct URLs.
[Via – The Verge]