Soon, Instagram will allow anyone on the platform to retweet your new photos, as long as your account is public. There will be a way to turn off remixing, but you’ll have to actively opt out once the option is on; it will be enabled by default.
In “the coming weeks,” Instagram says it will add the ability to “remix” public photos for use within Reels, its TikTok-like video service. The change is intended to provide more content for Reels creators to work on as the company focuses on short-form video in hopes of keeping up with its explosively popular competitor.
Remixing will be enabled by default, but Instagram will provide ways to disable it, according to Meta spokesperson Devi Narasimhan. Users will be able to turn off blending of individual photos or at the account level via the settings menu. Any photos posted before the feature goes live will have remixing turned off by default, but you can turn remixing on for individual posts if you want.
This is similar to the system Instagram used when it opened up all public videos to remixes in January, only making videos posted after the switch was made available for remixes.
Photographers have often been skeptical of Instagram’s handling of their photos, and today’s change, and the lack of options or clarification around it, likely won’t do the company any favors . In 2012, a change to the app’s terms of service sparked a wave of panic that the company could sell users’ photos (it couldn’t), but similar concerns have persisted almost every time its terms are changed of the service . More recently, Instagram leader Adam Mosseri declared that Instagram is “no longer a photo-sharing app.”
Remixing could help photographers’ work reach more people, but it could also put their work in contexts where they’d rather not see it, so I’d expect a lot of people to turn off the remix.