Instagram fans rejoice: you can finally zoom in on photos. The Facebook subsidiary announced on Wednesday it is bringing a new zoom feature to the app on iOS. The company says that the feature will work in the explore tab, the main feed, and on profile pages.
It’s a welcome addition to a platform photographers have adopted as a way of quickly sharing their work. Instagram isn’t afraid of changing how it works to please this crowd. The app previously dropped the square photo requirement, allowing users to upload shots in portrait or landscape. Although Instagram’s square images were a defining feature of the social network from the beginning, dropping the format meant users could share their photos closer to the original aspect ratio.
Similarly, zoom has been a notable omission from Instagram. Ever since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, complete with multi-touch interface, smartphone owners have been pinching and spreading their fingers to zoom on a daily basis. The fact that the feature never worked on Instagram always felt kind of weird, although it’s better late than never.
Instagram has been building out its feature set more over the past few months. It recently introduced a new Stories feature, which seemed to resemble Snapchat’s stories in more ways than one. Admittedly, Instagram is no stranger to copying: the app’s 15-second video feature came out suspiciously soon after Vine grew in popularity. Earlier this year, the service increased its video length to 60 seconds, enabling greater creative freedom for fans of short video experimentation.
Unfortunately, Android users are out of luck for zooming. Instagram has shafted Google’s platform before, notably when it rolled out a test version of its new black-and-white design to iOS first. Hopefully users of the world’s largest mobile operating system won’t be kept in the dark for too long.
