Despite being the world’s most popular photo-sharing app, Instagram’s always had one major problem – its image size is a bit meh.
When it launched in 2010, peddling photographs at a 640 x 640 resolution was fine by contemporary smartphone standards, but it doesn’t fly in 2015.
Fortunately, it seems Instagram is readying up a move to 1080 x 1080 images, and the clues are there if you know where to look.
Instagram isn’t currently displaying 1080 x 1080 images, but it’s now storing them at the higher resolution.
If you check the source code on Instagram’s web view, you can see that
It’s also worth noting that Instagram isn’t just stretching out 640 x 640 pixel images; these photos are actually native 1080 x 1080 pixel captures.
What’s more, photos uploaded from both iOS and Android are being saved at the higher resolution.
That could signal a bit improvement for Android users, who’ve had to suffer from over-compression on the Android Instagram app since launch.
Related: Best Android Apps 2015
If you want to find your high-resolution shots, go to an Instagram photo on a web browser and open the page’s source code.
From there, search for “.jpg” and the first thing you find will be a URL linking directly to a 1080 x 1080 version of the image.
Unfortunately, there’s no word from Instagram about when, or even if, we’ll see these high-resolution shots displayed within the smartphone app.
With Instagram potentially moving on to bigger and better things, you’ll want to have a solid smartphone to capture gloriously high-resolution snaps with. Perhaps our group test video might help: