Instagram boss Adam Mosseri published a controversial assessment of the platform’s position at the beginning of 2026.
In an Instagram post, he declares the classic square photo grid to be “dead” and describes a fundamental change in the aesthetics of the platform. Instead of polished images with smoothed skin and perfect landscapes, a “raw aesthetic” now dominates: shaky videos, blurry shots and unflattering snapshots of everyday life.
Mosseri justifies this with the emergence of AI-generated images. In a world in which artificial intelligence can produce flawless images, the professional look will become the hallmark of artificiality. By the way, Meta itself is one of the driving forces for integrating image generation into consumer interfaces, and Instagram also serves as an experimental field for AI tools.
His statements about camera manufacturers in particular are causing discontent in the photography community. These would “rely on the wrong aesthetic” by trying to make everyone look like a professional photographer from 2015. Flattering images are cheap to produce and boring to consume. Despite the criticism, Mosseri sees authenticity as an opportunity. In the future, the crucial question will no longer be whether someone can create something, but whether they can create something that only they could have created.
In any case, Instagram will have moved further and further away from the once iconic square over the course of 2025. This is particularly clear on the profile pages, where images are now displayed upright. Instagram has also added official support for 3:4 aspect ratio images. A more drastic hashtag limit from the previous 30 to now only five should also help authenticity in order to free image descriptions from generic keyword spam.
So Instagram is more or less saying: Serious photographers and their highly polished images are no longer really welcome on the platform. It has felt like this over the last few years because it was difficult to increase the reach of new members and the support tended to deteriorate: with Meta Verified, identity protection is only available behind a paywall.
As a result, ambitious projects have repeatedly tried to carve out an alternative digital space for photographers (such as “Photo”, which I have previously reported on here), but very few of them can reach a critical mass of the user base, or, like EyeEm, have to close again after a long time. The year 2026 is unlikely to fill this gap either. Too bad!
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Featured image: Zulfugar Karimov | via: Digital Camera World