For a photo sharing app, Instagram is getting a lot of flak for the confusion with their Terms of Service. Apparently, legalese is way beyond the comprehension of the common man so Instagram had to re-publish and re-clarify what it had meant in its previous ToS. It’s here if you want to read it.
Net of it all, Instagram is not going to sell your photos of cats, self-portraits, desserts and sunsets. What I’m more concerned about is that their latest “feature-rich” update removes a key feature that I use a lot: access to the Photo Library. If you’ve noticed, you can no longer directly access photos from your Photo Library. Instagram prevents this by only showing the Camera Roll folder.
There are some workarounds to this: if you have other camera apps such as Snapseed or Camera+, you will have to go through the motions of opening the photo there and then exporting it into Instagram. If you have Dropbox, you can also pre-load your Photo Library to sync with the photos folder and then download the photos into your device. If you’re on iOS, download photos automatically appear on the Photo Library reel.
So that’s that. Crippling features have made this otherwise simple-to-use app suck. Had I not spent weeks working to build a community here, I probably would have abandoned it when the first outrage regarding the ToS sprung up.
