That didn't last long

Instagram will be closing the doors on its standalone messaging app, Direct, within the next month.

A message confirming the planned closure is being displayed to users in the Direct for the Instagram app, and was first spotted by social media industry commentator Matt Navarra in the Dutch version of the app, who posted the Tweet below:

If you use Direct for Instagram regularly and you're worried about losing your conversations, fear not; according to Cnet they're just "moving over to the dedicated Instagram app", where your direct messages would normally appear.

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• A short lifespan

Instagram's standalone messaging app has been relatively short-lived, having only been launched in December 2017.

Much like Snapchat, the app opened your phone's camera upon launch, and
installing the app meant that your direct messaging inbox disappeared from the regular Instagram app and could only be accessed via Direct for Instagram.

Instagram is already killing its standalone Direct messaging app? @mosseri ? pic.twitter.com/sr0c90PzEc

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) May 15, 2019

So far Instagram hasn't responded to requests for comment, so we can only speculate as to why it's decided to cull the messaging app so early in its lifespan; perhaps users wanted all their Instagram-related activity to be in one app as opposed to two.

Either way, Instagram's foray into the world of instant messaging hasn't been as successful as that of its parent company: Facebook's Messenger app had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of April 2019, coming second only to WhatsApp, which boasts 1.6 billion.





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The change was quickly rolled back

Instagram had its users in a muddle over the holiday week as it accidentally rolled out a huge change to the mechanics of its photo feed – a change that meant users had to tap on images to advance through the feed, rather than using the traditional scrolling method.

In other words, you could browse the photo feed in the same way you browse Instagram Stories, by tapping to progress, and with new items shuffling in horizontally. Instagram says the experiment shouldn't have appeared for all users, and the update was quickly rolled back within an hour after attracting a whole lot of anger online.

If you want to see some of the disgruntled takes on this potential change to the feed, take a look at #InstagramUpdate on Twitter. Based on those responses we'd say it's going to be a long time before Instagram thinks about applying this tweak again.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri was quick to downplay the slip on Twitter, saying that the experiment should only have appeared for a very small group of users. If you're still seeing the horizontal feed in the app, try restarting it, Mosseri says.

NO I JUST TURNED OFF UPDATES HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME @INSTAGRAM I HOPE YOUR SHARES DIE IN A FIRE pic.twitter.com/4t90fXUxyx

— Emma Blackery (@emmablackery) December 27, 2018

Just like every other app out there, Instagram is continually testing new features and options with a limited number of people – profile redesigns and video tagging are just two such experiments we've seen in recent months – but it appears in this case the limited number of people ended up being just about everyone.

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It's not clear what benefits Instagram thinks this "new way to move through posts" might bring for users, but if you're a fan of the new style you might be out of luck – there's no indication this is going to be available again in the near future.



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Instagram gold alert

A holiday is a great time to start getting more creative with your photography, and the good news is that you don't need a bulky DSLR and a bag of lenses to do so – your smartphone is the perfect holiday snaps partner.

We don't suggest that you walk around with your eyes glued to the camera app, but proactive photography can make you appreciate a location's sights much more than just a stroll around them would.

The Grand Canyon, Paris, and Agra's Taj Mahal are all favorites for Instagram-ready pics – but what about the best spots in the UK?

Below we've listed some of the kinds of locations that are enduringly popular with photographers, and some specific UK examples, with tips on how you can use your phone's camera to do them justice.

The big city

The obvious UK choice for street photo opportunities is a big city somewhere with the most famous sights and most things to do.

A city is a great place to squeeze the most out of a multi-camera phone, particularly if it has a wide-angle lens, as the Mate 20 Pro and LG V40 do. The lines of tall buildings show off the geometric distortion of one of these 'larger than life' lenses, which can make buildings appear to loom over you in photos.

A 2x or 3x zoom lens is also perfect for avoiding the typical London shots that have been posted a thousand times on Instagram already. These lenses let you use non-typical framing, which you can turbo-charge by pointing your camera up or down rather than just looking for shots at eye level.

Street photography with real people often results in the most memorable, most 'specific' images, though. You need a bit of confidence to start pointing your camera at total strangers, but if you can summon the courage, consider using your phone's manual mode to maintain a fairly fast shutter speed to keep their faces looking sharp.

Top photo tip: When shooting in an urban environment, try a long exposure if you have a way to keep your camera still – you can turn passing people into ghostly blurs.

Travel tip: In London in particular, you can get great results by searching for examples of the juxtaposition of new and old – you'll find lots of examples of buildings that are hundreds of years old next to gleaming new ones.

If you're visiting London you can save money on accommodation by settling on a spot just out of the center, such as Shepherd's Bush or Fulham. And if only a bargain will do, check out hotels in Croydon – it's 10 miles from central London, but fast train connections will get you to the sights in no time.

Scenic cities

One of the great things about the UK is that the cities within it are varied in their style - venture further afield and you can get some really pretty places to get snapping.

For cloudy and stormy weather, make sure your phone's HDR mode is engaged – this avoids the whiter parts of clouds becoming blown out, and retains more detail in the moody dark parts.

To get the most dramatic look from such images, you can then increase contrast in your phone's photo editor, or with an app like Snapseed – try to avoid letting any areas of cloud appear overexposed for pro-looking images.

If you find somewhere with a relatively large peak in the vicinity, you'll often see people walking up at the summit, looking like tiny stick figures, and this is a great opportunity to experiment with an effect called tilt-shift, where the image is blurred apart from, usually, a single horizontal band of sharpness. It makes grand nature and city scenes look almost toy-like.

If your phone's camera app doesn't have a tilt-shift option built-in, you'll find it in a photo editor app like Pixlr.

Top photo tip: Make sure your phone camera's HDR mode is selected, otherwise you may end up with overexposed or dull images on those cloudy days.

Travel tip: Edinburgh is arguably the UK’s most scenic large city. It's dominated by the spectacular Edinburgh Castle, which towers 80 meters above the surrounding terrain, while just a short walk from the city center you'll find yourself surrounded by beautiful nature.

However, you can also experience about three seasons' worth of weather in half an hour in the city.

Just outside the center, Holyrood Park is home to Arthur’s Seat, a dramatic-looking mini-mountain that offers a short, and not-too-sharp, climb, and from where you'll be treated to great views of the city. It’s an extinct volcano that last erupted 350 million years ago and perfect for the tip above.

Book in the right month and an Edinburgh stay will be fairly affordable if you weigh up the options from Airbnb and a good hotel search site. However, prices rocket in August, the month of the Edinburgh festival.

Coastal scenes

A south-eastern coastal town offers the perfect combo of easy access by train and coach, reasonable hotel prices for much of the year and some fantastic nearby nature and scenery.

This is a great opportunity to experiment with color and to see how close your phone's own color reproduction is to what your own eyes see. On a bright, sunny day, a mid-range phone or higher should perform pretty well.

Around sunset or sunrise is the real test, as phones tend to struggle to recreate the rich reds, orange and yellow tones present, in part because of their limited native dynamic range. Just as when shooting stormy or cloudy skies, the first step is to switch HDR on.

This helps your phone's camera retain color information at the horizon, to avoid the brightest parts appearing too close to white. You can then try post-shoot editing your photos or videos while the scene is still in front of you, altering the color tone and saturation sliders in your phone's image editor to get the most realistic results.

Posting to Instagram? You may want to be a little less rigorous with the realism, and whack up the contrast and color further.

Coastal locations also offer great opportunities to shoot a timelapse, if your camera has this mode – you can capture the setting sun sinking into the ocean on the horizon, or clouds moving dramatically over cliffs.

Top photo tip: A tilt-shift app can make your cliff photos look more dynamic.

Travel tip: Eastbourne is a perfect example of all the conditions above, and you’ll find basic rooms in the center of town for around £40 / $50 a night. If the weather’s nice you can then walk through Eastbourne and up along the coast, past the dramatic cliffs of Beachy Head and Seven Sisters.

Natural wonders

One of the great things about the UK is that it's chock-full of ragged-yet-inspiring rock formations, natural wonders that cry out to be experimented on photographically.

They're a great place to experiment with black and white photography, as many are naturally grey, and removing color puts the focus on the sharpness and crazy-looking natural geometry on the show.

There's always more than one way to shoot a scene, though, and are often a great opportunity to test out your phone's shallow depth of field capabilities. This mode may be called Portrait, Aperture or something similar, and is found in all but the cheapest new models.

Find a spot where you can compose a scene where there's a clear foreground of the rocky towers, and a background of the sea lapping away behind. Select the rocks as your focal point and you'll be able to blur out the sea behind, bringing the rock into sharper relief.

Top photo tip: Increasing sharpness in your images can highlight the natural granularity of stone.

Travel tip: The Giant’s Causeway, located in County Antrim on the north coast of Northern Ireland, is one of the most Instagrammable sites in the UK.

It’s a natural phenomenon, but looks man-made, with thousands of hexagonal columns of rock linked together creating what looks like a gigantic art installation. It was formed as a 'lake' of exposed volcanic basalt cooled somewhere between 50 and 60 million years ago and is just perfect for the above.

If you're traveling by bus, check what time the last one back to your hotel leaves, so that you don't end up sleeping on the stones and under the stars.

Amazing topography

If you’re looking for sprawling nature scenes rather than urban attractions, there are dozens and dozens to choose from.

When shooting great vistas like this, you at the mercy of the light conditions, and some landscape photography enthusiasts will sit on a hill-top for hours waiting for sunlight to hit the right spot.

Let's assume, for now, that you won't want to go that far. Big, dramatic scenes like this are a good fit for dynamic framing of a scene. Remember panoramas? We were all obsessed with them briefly about six years ago, and now everyone seems to have forgotten the mode exists. It's still there, though.

You can go further too. Download Google Cardboard and you can capture 360-degree images, which should appear seamless in a landscape scene like this. You can then let friends and family check out your holiday shots on a VR headset, rather than just posting to Instagram.

Top photo tip: Use the rule of thirds to make your landscapes better. Split the vertical and horizontal into three zones, and compose so the points of interest sit where their borders cross.

Travel tip: For a great nature scene, Llandudno in Wales has an elevated experience of its own. A limestone headland known as the Great Orme sits above the town, and you can take a cable tramway up to the top. The views may not be as dramatic as those from Snowdon, but it's another great Instagram op, and the 20-minute tramway journey is a lot easier on the feet.

For the intrepid outdoors type, the northern tip of Snowdonia National Park is right on the edge of the town, with the foot of Mount Snowdon itself around an hour’s drive away.

Hit the beach (yes, in the UK)

You might not think you can do amazing beach scenes in the UK, but it's totally possible. It’s all about finding the huge expanse of sand between the seafront and the sea, and this makes for dramatic-looking beach images – but you do need to get creative.

Compose your shot right and you can make a sea view look like a minimalist painting, with the sand, sea and sky as three distinct yet unified parts.

Alternatively, try shooting a black and white image across the waterfront, then increasing contrast post-shoot to add drama to the spray. Have someone you can use as a subject? Try using the reflectivity of the film of water ahead of the waves to capture a friend's refection, with their back facing the camera.

This is also an opportunity to experiment with color pop effects if they're wearing any colorful clothing.

Color pop desaturates an image aside from one tone, and while most camera apps don't have this option many editing apps do, including Snapseed.

Top photo tip: Experiment with color saturation and white balance to add punch to beach scenes.

Travel tip: It's one of the least likely-sounding Instagram hits, but Cleethorpes in north-eastern England is home to some of the UK’s most impressive beaches.

If you’ve never even heard of Cleethorpes, let alone thought of visiting, you may be wondering why these beaches have such a reputation.

Cleethorpes also offers a light railway, country park, and boating lake – although if you’re not going there for the beach you’re probably doing it wrong. You can find a decent hotel and guest house rooms in Cleethorpes from £35 / $45 a night, depending on the season.




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No need to say 'over'.

Sick of typing out Instagram Direct messages like a chump? Well, you're in luck, because the latest version of the popular photo-sharing app (ver. 73.0.0.22.185) now allows users to send their friend's quick voice recordings.

All you have to do in order to start communicating walkie-talkie style is open any Direct message thread, then tap and hold the microphone icon to begin the voice recording process.

Once you've offered your two cents, release your finger from the recording icon to send your voice message. This will work with either individual or group message threads.

Unlike walkie-talkies, your messages will stick around, allowing your buddies to reply to your recordings at their leisure. The new feature arrives just six months after the introduction of video calling on the platform.

Instagram Voice Messaging is available now for both iOS and Android devices.


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You'll have had an email if you've been affected

The Download Your Data tool Instagram recently launched may have revealed some passwords to the world at large, the company says – though only a few users were affected apparently, and the bug has now been patched.

As a per a report in The Information, when some users opted to download their Instagram photos and videos, their passwords were included in the URL needed to access the archive – a URL other people may have found if they had somehow got access to the same browsing history or the same computer or device.

If your account was affected by the security flaw, you should have already received an email about it from Instagram. Via an official statement, Instagram says a "small number of people" were hit, and that the issue has now been patched up.

Keep it secret, keep it safe

While this seems to have been a relatively minor security problem, it's not the only security issue Facebook (which owns Instagram) has had to deal with in recent months. Let's hope it's not a sign of something more serious in the Instagram code.

As always, we'd recommend using different passwords on all your accounts, and enlisting the help of a password manager. Switch on two-factor authentication where it's available (as it is on Instagram), and make sure your mobile devices and computers are well protected with passwords, PIN codes, and face unlocking too.

If you have got an email off Instagram or you just want to be on the safe side, you might want to change your password to something new. Instagram says the passwords weren't leaked anywhere except in the browser URL for the data download.



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Honestly, we're not sure if that's a good or bad thing

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Makeover time

DSLR-like pictures directly from the app

Instead of complying with Apple native app rules, Facebook's Instagram is ditching its Apple Watch app in favor of notifications.

"The Instagram app for Apple Watch will no longer be available as a stand-alone experience once users upgrade to Instagram version 39 on iOS, released April 2, 2018. We are committed to providing users with the best experience with their Apple products and we will continue to explore ways to achieve this on all platforms. Users with an Apple Watch will continue to enjoy a great Instagram experience through various rich and varied notifications. "

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