Square is no longer hip if you’re a keen Instagram user with the Facebook, Inc. division announcing Thursday long overdue support for uploading photos in more standard photography shapes.

While not doing anything as extreme as going into odd shapes, the app maker did formally announce that users will be able to upload pictures via the app in both landscape and portrait modes; if you’re not an Instagram user previously users had to crop pictures to a square.

“Square format has been and always will be part of who we are,” a post on the Instagram blog reads. “That said, the visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first, and we want to make it simple and fun for you to share moments just the way you want to.”

Explaining the previously absurdity of forcing users to crop pictures, the post continues stating “we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram: friends get cut out of group shots, the subject of your video feels cramped and you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end.”

“Now, when choosing a photo or video, you can tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square.”

The addition of support for more standard sizes will particularly help video, and given Facebook Inc.’s serious push into video (Facebook owning Instagram) user uploads to Facebook itself.

Long overdue

Instagram users will without question welcome and embrace the change, particularly given that cropping a picture to fit the previous square format did, as Instagram points out, mean sacrificing parts of a picture that the user may have wanted to have been kept in.

The weird, perhaps never to be answered mystery is why has the additional support taken so long?

There are plenty of existing apps on the market that support the uploading of pictures in portrait or landscape, and the reason doesn’t need much in the way of explanation: they are the default two ways of taking a picture.

Could it be that its dominance of the picture sharing app market made Instagram laggard in improving the app?

Either way the updated version is allegedly available for download from both the Apple App Store and on Google Play, however we note allegedly as no update is being shown as available when accessing the Google Play store from outside of the United States at the time of writing, although it will likely eventually appear.

For millennials, or those not quite old enough to understand the headline, here’s some classic Huey Lewis and the News from 1986.

Image credit: Instagram