How to post photos to Instagram with a compact camera

"Save Ferris" © Andy Marfia 2013 All Rights Reserved. Sony RX100, 1/60sec at f3.5, ISO800.

This weekend was Chicago's Riot Fest and to my surprise they had a ferris wheel.  I enjoy a good ferris wheel.  I've already posted this to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, so it seems fitting that it makes an appearance on Blogger as well.  I don't want Blogger to feel left out-- she's pretty sensitive.  (Yes, blogger is a female.)

I took this photo with a Sony RX100.  It was an experiment, as I wanted to see how difficult it would be to post a photo from a compact camera or a DSLR to Instagram.  With Instagram, there's no desktop application-- you have to upload photos with either a phone or a tablet.  Unfortunately the camera in my phone is middling even in the best of circumstances, and for a night shot like this it's thoroughly over-matched.  I wanted to use better gear.

Here are the steps involved:

1. First, obviously, take an excellent photo.  Duh! 
2. Second, move the file from the camera to a desktop computer or a laptop. 
3. Next, edit with Photoshop or your graphics program of choice and save as a 612px x 612px file (this is the standard large size for Instagram). 
4. Finally, move the file to an Android tablet or phone that has the Instagram app.  I used a Google Nexus 7 tablet.  To my surprise, so long as I didn't select any filters, Instagram left the image unaltered.  Perfect.  Upload.  I crossed posted to Facebook and Twitter and later uploaded a slightly larger version to Flickr.

Please note: If you have a camera with WIFI, and don't care about editing on a computer, you can skip the second step and just move the photo from your camera to your phone.

I'm calling this process "sort-of-gram" because it's not terribly instant and, frankly, seems at odds with the point of Instagram.  Still, it's nice to know that it's an option.  I stopped using Instagram last year during the terms of use controversy but they haven't done anything evil since then (that I'm aware of), so I may post there every once in a while.  When in Insta-Rome...

Flickr's liquid layout causes blurry / soft photos

UPDATE 05/21/13: Flickr went live with a redesigned web site today, and... the BLURRY PHOTOS ARE BACK. Photos below 1024 are being downsampled again, and the slight blurriness that I noted in that first example below has returned. Sigh. I give up.

UPDATE 06/13/12: Following a suggestion made in the help thread, I'm happy to note that FLICKR HAS REMOVED DOWNSAMPLING FOR ALL PHOTOS BELOW 1024px. For me, that effectively solves this issue. I'm going to leave this post in place for purely historical purposes.

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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I didn't care for Flickr's new "liquid" layout. My chief complaint at the time concerned the overall design of the site, and how the layout interacted poorly with vertical photos and also the smaller photos in my archive. I'm still annoyed by that, but a much bigger problem has come to the the forefront since then. Flickr's liquid design causes blurry photos.

Here's an example of a horizontal photo exhibiting this problem:



Original image: www.flickr.com/photos/abmarfia/6773676926/

Both screenshots are from the photo page. At full screen the 1024px version is displayed on my monitor (which has a resolution of 1600x1200px). To achieve the 1018px version I simply resized the browser until Flickr's liquid layout starts to downsample the photo. I've noticed this effect is most pronounced between 800px and 1024px, and most obvious on photos that include text, like the one above. I can trigger this blurriness in Firefox, IE, and Chrome, and have tried it on at least three different Windows machines. It's not limited to just my own photos. I can make your photos look blurry too!

Here's a vertical photo:



Original image: www.flickr.com/photos/abmarfia/6833975456/

In this case, I'm comparing a photo from the photo page with the exact same photo (Flickr's 800px Medium size) from the All Sizes page. When I take the screen shot and crop them in Photoshop they are the exact same size, yet I'm clearly not seeing the same photo on both pages.

This is a pernicious problem-- it effects everyone, but not many people can actually see it. If you're viewing Flickr from a lower resolution monitor, chances are you're seeing the old 640px version of photos (which still look fantastic) and everything is hunky dory for you. Even for those with high resolution screens, not everyone will notice the problem. It's just subtle enough that someone who isn't concerned with sharpness may not notice or care. Or maybe they'll think something is wrong with their eyes!

Isn't that fantastic-- a photo sharing site that makes you question your eye sight?

I've complained about this thoroughly in Flickr's help thread, but I've lost faith that Flickr intends to fix this problem. As of this writing, no staff have weighed in on the topic in over a week. [UPDATE BELOW]

UPDATE 06/10/12: As mentioned in the comments, flickr staff have weighed in on the help thread since I first posted, here, here and here.

UPDATE 06/13/12: Following a suggestion made in the help thread, I'm happy to note that FLICKR HAS REMOVED DOWNSAMPLING FOR ALL PHOTOS BELOW 1024px. For me, that effectively solves this issue. I'm going to leave this post in place for purely historical purposes.

UPDATE 05/21/13: Flickr launched a redesigned web site today, and... the BLURRY PHOTOS ARE BACK. Sigh.

Flickr goes live with 'liquid' layout, I groan

Flickr went live yesterday with a new "liquid" layout for their photo pages.  It’s meant to allow for larger photos on the photo page by dynamically resizing images depending on the resolution of your screen.  Not a bad idea in theory.  In practice, it's a mess.  This was my first experience with this layout (on a 1600x1200 screen monitor):



At first glance I assumed something had gone haywire in the browser.  It looks like a broken page with the photo pushed to the left and all that white space in the center.  After several refreshes, and then opening the page in a new browser, I finally found my way to the flickr blog, and then the help forum, where I realized this was in fact done intentionally!  Good grief.

Things thankfully get better when viewing a horizontal photo:



Then I realized that things get much worse.  Here’s a vertical image where the image is much larger in height (as opposed to the previous image which was only 900px):

[UPDATE at the bottom of the page: flickr has fixed this problem]



Notice how the image is cut off and you have to scroll to see the whole thing.  Even by scrolling I can't fit the entire image in the browser window.  This was also done intentionally.  You don't have to be a designer to realize that a photo sharing site should allow the view of an entire photo-- that's just common sense.

Finally, since this change only seems to be affecting photos posted after March of 2010, here's what every page in my archive from 2005 to 2010 looks like:



Again, you don't have to be a designer to realize this doesn't look right.  This is bad design in 2012.  Hell, it would have been bad design in 2002.

I've generally responded positively to changes that flickr has made in the past, but this new layout needs work and I hope they tweak it, a lot.  As is, it ruins the consistency of the interface and makes the photo page for every photo in my archive look like broken CSS.

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I'd be remiss in not mentioning the article in Gizmodo yesterday: "How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet".  (Oddly timed on the same day that flickr rolled out this new layout).  While I agree with the basic premise-- that Flickr & Yahoo have missed opportunities and most casual users have left for Facebook-- my experience on Flickr is not the same as the author's.  I still find it to be a vibrant community of people who are passionate about photography, and I continue to have daily interaction there that I find meaningful.

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UPDATE 5/16/12 9:30 PM

At some point this evening flickr released an update which solves my complaints about the vertical images getting cut off.  It also centers the images so they now look like this:



I appreciate the resizing fix but I'm not sure centering is much of an improvement.  Now, instead of white space on the right side we have huge patches of white space on the right AND left.  Also, this separates the photo from the title, which just looks odd.

UPDATE 6/1/12

Flickr's liquid layout is also causing blurry photos for some users.  This followup post has a couple of examples.