The Facebook photo-sharing app Instagram is launching a new way to browse photos and it makes tons of sense. Instead of scrolling up and down to look for photos, the new feature allows users to swipe left to right in order to view multiple photos from a similar user.
But there’s a catch. The feature is only available to advertisers. So when a sponsored post wants to tell a story through photos, it’s easy peasy for users to scroll through. But if you just want to see a series of photos of your friend’s dog chasing a lizard whilst wearing a birthday hat, you’re out of luck.
For now anyway. According to re/code, the “carousel ads” are just an experiment right now and they’re not charging advertisers for the extra feature that also includes a “landing” page that allows users to interact with the company advertising.
A video demonstration of the feature shows a charity with photos of presumably African-American children in a school setting. After scrolling through the photos there’s a button to donate.
Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, already has a feature available to smart phone and tablet users that allows them to scroll horizontally through photos. That means it’s not a stretch to think the swipe feature may not be too far off for the common user.
Currently Instagram features a “news feed” in which users scroll down through photos posted by people they follow. To view multiple photos by one user now a person has to go to the individual profile first.
It doesn’t seem like that much more effort, but in these days of increasing productivity, a couple more touches of the screen has become a pretty big deal.
Check out the demo on Vimeo here.
Florida Politics and SaintPetersBlog have a super snazzy Instagram you can like here.
