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Instagram: Quit Moaning, Your Twee "Photos" Are Worthless Anyway

by Jordan Waller
19 December 2012 9 Comments

Honestly, if the idea of people looking at your photographs for free really bothers you then you should probably reconsider joining a photography based social network...

Surprise, surprise, Instagram is evil too.

The freshly Facebook owned Instagram have just announced changes in their terms of service that will mean that as of 16th January 2013 they will have the right to sell your pictures as they see fit without giving you any say or compensation. In response to this the land of Twitter has obviously gone bonkers trending the name of the site both with AND without a hashtag. Which in Twitter terms is serious shit.

I think we can all agree that what Instagram have done here is a bit cheeky and evil on Google Scale but quite why everyone is so shocked about it is utterly beyond me. Let’s face it; large corporations have been sucking the lifeblood out of us for decades whether they’re the Coca Cola Company or direct mail credit card enforcers. You hardly have to be a Bilderberg conspiracy theorist to realize it and has it affected your life in any atrociously negative way so far? No, has it balls. At least not for the majority of western civilization anyway.

There’s a common joke that having ‘Instagram doesn’t make you a photographer.’ This is a joke that’s funny because it’s true. Having access to a digital filter does not make you a photographer, which is demonstrated by the crap you have to sift through on any given day if you’re a regular user. The fact that so many people have become outraged at all over this shows that many Instagram users not only have a severely inflated sense of themselves but that they also apparently do class themselves as photographers. Reading the many tweets it’s clear that lots of people seem to genuinely believe that their ‘creative property’ is at risk.  Which is mind boggling quite frankly, do you honestly really think anyone actually gives a shit about which craft fairs you’ve been to this weekend or #WhatYouWoreToday?

Owning or not owning the rights to your sepia-toned cupcake photographs and birds-eye views of brogues stood near puddles won’t affect your ability to remain an entirely vacuous and self-absorbed Internet entity. It definitely won’t stop me from taking pictures of my food anyway. Namely because I know for a fact that nobody would actually want to buy them. Hell, I’m often shocked that people even look at most of them. Can we actually seriously imagine Instagram becoming a contender in the world of stock-photography, which is what a lot of the press are suggesting. It’s the photographic equivalent of Belle and Sebastian being the soundtrack to every single advert and every film starring Joseph Gordon Levitt in a plot about walking puppies with Ryan Gosling while they chase after Zooey Dechanel for 500 days. It’s a tweed-clad twee overlords wet dream. The world is often a sick place but it’s not sickly.

More…

Off Your Face(book): What Not To Do When You’re Drunk On Social Media

“Sh*t Happens!”: How It Feels To Sell Instagram For One Billion Dollars

I really cannot see Instagram making serious money out of photo distribution. At least not until the quality of photographs gets any better anyhow, or it becomes harder to not just ‘steal’ them instead, which I can’t see happening either. There are more than enough better and (probably) cheaper places that you can get imagery from. As far as I can really see, being worried about Instagram fleecing you is just giving yourself a cyber ego massage and reassuring yourself that you’re a real photographer. At best some of your images might pop up in an Instagram advert, which isn’t really that different from uploading them onto the site in the first place and let’s face it, if the idea of people looking at your photographs for free really bothers you then you should probably reconsider joining a photography based social network.

As I type there’s currently a plethora of people crying about all of this so much that they’re threatening to actually delete their entire Instagram account, Valencia filtered memories and all. The key adjective in all of this being the word ‘threatening,’ which is all they’re really doing. Very few will actually leave as that would be too much of an effort and quite frankly a massive a pain. Plus, you’re not actually guaranteed that by doing that you’re removing the images from Instagrams vast and no doubt gargoyle adorned database.

Yes, by engaging in such underhand tactics Instagram are being a sneaky bunch of sneaks but will it ruin any of our lives that much? No. Obviously they now technically have the right to flog our Dutch-angled photos for squillions of pounds but it’s hardly going to affect the majority of us, if it even affects anyone at all. The company themselves are fairly adamant that it’s just some misleading wording that will allow them to align everything with Facebook a little easier, which it might be. It might also be a way for them to sell our souls to Satan or a tactical attempt to get a bit of money out of their social rival Twitter at some point. A site that they’re currently in the midst of severing usability ties with. Generally though if Instagram are looking to monetize the company there are lots of other less controversial ways that they could do it. Charging for the app itself and creating novelty mugs are just two of those ways.

In the grander scheme of things, the Facebook empire already own so much information about us anyway that suddenly having the legal clearance to trade our personal pictures isn’t going to make much of a difference in the long run. If they really do turn out to be Orwellian styled tyrants we’re already screwed, pseudo-sun glazed pictures or not.

Now quit moaning about it and enjoy real life. The world is going to end on Friday anyway.

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image descriptionCOMMENTS

lerouge 2:59 pm, 19-Dec-2012

I know what you're saying and sort of agree. I was on FB for about 20 minutes about 10 years ago until I came to the conclusion that it wasn't for me (or to put it another way a load of useless shit). One of the reasons was that I no longer owned any of the few pics I put on there. I think that's what I would be pissed off about with instagram. Agreed- most of my life is quantified into 1's and 0's by Skynet or whatever but given the gazillions of images that instragram will own there is a significant possibility that they will be able to flog some of those images to, for instnace, Coke who could use them to further flog their product. That's wrong; the person who actually took the picture would receive nothing, yet Zuckerberg etc would finally be able to afford that gold plated jacuzzi on the moon they'd been hankering after for ages. Worst case scenario I know, but you get my point. And if it's a tit for tat against Twitter (a twit for twat?) then it stick in the craw a bit more as the ordinary schmo is unwittingly used as a footsoldier in a battle between monstrous egos.

Sinbad 3:03 pm, 19-Dec-2012

So what about anyone who has any level of celebrity / government / important status? - Not only will instagram sell any privately taken photos to the press (personal family shots, etc) but they will be making $$$ off of this as well. If it were me, I'd be fuming, more so about the fact Instagram can take personal moments and sell them on, it's a massive invasion of privacy and not something to be taken lightly.

Jordan Waller 3:19 pm, 19-Dec-2012

I see where you're going Le Rouge but at the same time I'm not wholly convinced that brands would waste money buying images on Instagram just because they don't actually need to. If someone has taken a picture of a product and posted it they're already getting a free advert, there would be no point in buying the image when it's already out there for them for free. The quality of the images themselves is simply not good enough to warrant purchasing to put in another place for very little benefit. If the paywall gave way for censorship on the other hand, say stopping people from speaking negatively about a brand with their images that would be a different matter. But again, I don't really see that being viable. In terms of press buying private photos Sinbad, I'd argue that by posting them up in such a public forum in the first place they're no longer private. Plus, even before the images were made buyable, newspapers and magazines would still just take them and print them anyway.

jill 4:43 pm, 19-Dec-2012

Best friggin' thing i've read in a long time. And yes - seeing as we've only got, what, 48 hours left at best (does anyone know what TIME it's ending? I mean, Greenwich Mean Time?) is this really what people want to be thinking about? I'd much rather be reading this post. Go out laughing. Out Loud.

Joe Fitzpatrick 6:19 pm, 19-Dec-2012

Spot on. If you didn't want to lose exclusive rights to your work, you shouldn't have hosted it on a site you don't own. Or pay for. For the record, there isn't a single professional photographer worth their salt who would dream of putting valuable content on instagram, or anywhere free for that matter. It's their livelihood, so they expect to pay for it to be looked after and protected. The people moaning about this are the same morons who moan that Facebook makes money from selling user data. NO SHIT. Zuckerberg is worth $14bn but charges users nothing to use his invention - where do people think his cash comes from? Bottom line, if you want 100% ownership of digital assets, don't expect to get it for free. Durrrr...

le rouge 10:02 pm, 19-Dec-2012

Jordan, Thanks for the reply. I was thinking more along Sinbad's line though, photos of unknown people not products. Still, good article and people need to be more savvy in general instead of whining about something after they've lost it.

Jbernardt 12:15 am, 20-Dec-2012

They're not looking for the next David Bailey. It's the data that's stored with the image that's valuable to Instagram (read Facebook). Eg You take a photo of your baby while eating a burger at your local macDs. They use that photo to advertise BigMacs to your contacts. You like the sound of that?

James C 4:40 pm, 20-Dec-2012

If you're that bothered about people selling your shite pictures of ugly arse trainers and bacon sandwiches - delete your account and sign up to Flickr.

Jordan Waller 1:04 pm, 22-Dec-2012

That has been happening in various forms for a long time Jbernardt and would still happen with or without Instagram. Facebook do it, Google do it,Twitter do it, MySpace, anywhere there are lots of people. It's one of the perils of using the internet although before that it was just people selling your addresses to Direct Marketers or phone numbers etc.

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