Instagram May Soon Break Its Classic Grid (and All Your 3×3 Mosaics)

Michael Zhang

Instagram has long featured a 3×3 grid of photos across its platform, allowing photographers to get creative and create larger photo mosaics by uploading the individual pieces as separate photos in the correct order. If you’ve spent a considerable amount of time and effort building these mosaics yourself, here’s some bad news: it looks like Instagram may soon break that classic grid (and your mosaics).

The Ringer reports that a number of Instagram users across the Web have noticed 4×4 grids on their accounts.

Some users aren’t pleased about it, since switching to 4×4 completely messes up the look of existing 3×3 mosaics. What were once clever mosaics are now seen as a jumbled mess of images. Here’s a sampling of some of the complaints that have been posted, pleading with Instagram to not break existing mosaics by changing the layout:

Even people who don’t post 3×3 photo mosaics often upload photos in a particular order based on how it makes the resulting grid look — the position of photos relative to each other is disrupted.

Instagram never promised that the 3×3 grid would be a permanent feature of the service, so photographers who relied upon it for carefully planned layouts were trusting in a design choice that has always been subject to abrupt change. If you’ve spent years uploading 3×3 mosaics to Instagram, you may soon have to live with a profile filled with scrambled up pictures.

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