Toronto Mike

Why I Never Liked Instagram

Why I Never Liked Instagram

Instagram users are a little ticked off after learning they're changing their terms and conditions so they can now use and sell your photos without your permission or paying you.  Eek.

I take lots of pictures.  As a natural born archivist, I always feel like capturing the moment with a shot.  I never take video, it's always a digital picture, and I upload almost all my pictures to my Flickr account as I have since my first upload in December 2004.

Michelle's Feet

When Instagram came on the scene, I hated how people were intentionally and artificially processing their pictures to make them look old or Polaroided.  In my opinion, the aged look of a photograph only has value when it's earned.  In other words, a picture looking old is wonderful when it's an old picture, and the Polaroid-zation of a pic makes perfect sense when it was taken with a Polaroid camera, but forcing these effects is phony and ruins an otherwise nice picture.  I never created an Instagram account.

When I started on Flickr, it was a small Canadian company with the best interface I'd ever seen.  Now it's part of the Yahoo! family, but it remains the only online service I pay for each year.  And I still use it each and every week.

Instagram isn't the only big web thing I've had no interest in.  I never had a MySpace account, I've never been tempted by Tumblr or Pinterest, but I've fully embraced Twitter, deem Facebook a necessary evil and tried my best to make Google+ work.

Do you use Instagram?  Will you continue to use it after this change to the terms and conditions?

Author image
About Toronto Mike
Toronto
I own TMDS and host Toronto MIke'd. Become a Patron.