It’s New Year’s Eve, which means your Instagram feed – if it’s something like mine – is probably filled with people posting ‘top’ nine ‘rosters of their favorite photos of the year. But for another year, everyone will be surprised to see them go to sketchy apps and third-party websites to do so. Because once again, Instagram does not offer an official, automated way to compile the images in the app.
As someone who enjoys using the top nine format to look back on a year of baked good photos, I am completely confused about this. Users look love to put together the collages to look back on their past years of posts. Instagram has even offered networking tools to post photos in different versions to your story. And this definitely has access to the data.
Just look at the popularity of Spotify’s Wrapped year in review feature, which will dominate December, with users showing their most songs, genres and stats. Instagram should be aware of the trend – Instagram stories are one of the most popular places where users show their taste in music.
Plus, Instagram is the owner of Facebook, the company that did pioneering work for automated videos for year review. Facebook uses the power of algorithms to compile instant videos and ‘girlfriend’ highlights (though sometimes depressingly). Let users automatically create and share top nine posts, looks like a no-brainer. But 2020 passes without even nodding the nearest idea.
Instead, users of third-party services are left behind, dozens of whom pop up app store cards every year. These services ask users to transfer personal information, such as their email addresses, or insist on plastering images with ugly watermarks or logos.
It’s easy to imagine how Instagram can streamline this process and even solve some of the pain points in most third-party options, such as the inability to generate top nine schedules for private accounts.
And yet it looks like 2020 will end with Instagram dropping the ball on this seemingly obvious feature. I assume there is always 2021.