« Walking away from Instagram

Reading this article made me think quite a lot, and since I’ve been thinking just as the author for quite a while now I’ve decided to ‘walk away’ from social media.
Here’s my write up of what I’ve learnt and how can you actually manage to ‘remove yourself’ from social websites.

I’ve joined Instagram in September 2011, or at least, that was my first pic there, I remember my boss telling me that it was just like another app, which I can’t even remember the name: it offered the same filters but didn’t offer any sharing/social capabilities.

Seven years later from its inception Instagram was sold for about 1B USD to Facebook.

Part of my issues with Instagram are linked to Facebook and the changes to their privacy policy in the years, but once I started trying to delete all of my photos from Instagram I’ve also realised a few other things, which I am keen to share.

I also recently found that you cannot remove the Instagram app from your android phone, just as you can’t remove the Facebook app: I find this utterly appalling: all you can do is disable it.

It’s hard to delete your pics.

I ended up installing on my Android an app called Cleaner, other services that are linked on many how-to websites don’t work. But it’s not easy anyway, Instagram imposes a rather low API limit on their API, with Cleaner you will have to scroll down to load in the app, select all your pics and then patiently retry deleting them, I had about 1500 pictures so it took me 30 retries!

It’s scary how anyone can actually download your entire collection.

Before deleting all the pics I’ve indeed backed them all up, using this app.

Now, backing up was really easy! It took minutes, and the scary thing is that you can actually download anyone else archive, without any authentication. 
So if you really can’t live without Instagram, I strongly recommend to at least set your profile to private, possibly avoiding sharing your location.

Everyone takes more pictures but the quality is going down.

I used to try harder to take a good shot, I even went on holidays or city walks almost for the sake of taking a good shot. 
Instagram is killing that, everyone takes pics but the ultimate goal is likes or selfies. I still need to go through my 1500+ pics collection, as I want to print some, back-up some of them, the best ones, perhaps on Flickr, but there’s so much junk!

And I think that was what killed it, that was what really made me walk away from it, I used to be a better photographer, I used to try harder and try to improve, I want to go back using my Nikon DSLR, I am done.