I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in making a common Instagram mistake lately. You open the app, see an interesting first post, and start swiping through the photo carousel. Swipe, swipe, swipe… and suddenly, you realize you’re way past the old 10-photo limit. You’re fifteen photos deep into a post from someone you barely know! The worst part? This keeps happening. There’s no warning before you commit to these endless scrolls. If you’re one of those people regularly dropping 20-photo “photo dumps,” it might be time to rethink your strategy. While they might be fun for you, for anyone outside your inner circle, these posts are, let’s be honest, a bit of a nuisance.
It’s hard to blame anyone for getting caught up in Instagram’s latest feature. This 20-photo update, launched last August, feels like the natural evolution of the photo dump trend, which, in moderation, can be enjoyable. For those unfamiliar, a photo dump, as The New Yorker cleverly described in their article, “The Desperation of the Instagram Photo Dump,” is a collection of typically five or more photos that “seemed to be chaotic jumbles, but the collections of images often conveyed an over-all atmosphere—a vibe—by way of juxtaposition, with the disparate scenes cohering like the elements of a collage.” Photo dumps can include anything: blurry selfies, group shots, mirror pics, food pics, pets, outfits, parks, cityscapes, friends, family, sunsets, Spotify screenshots, vacation snaps – basically anything that adds to your desired “vibe.” Creating these posts is fun, no doubt. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve taken the photo dump concept a little too far with this new 20-photo capacity.
The sheer volume of these 20-picture dumps is kind of killing the fun. A 20-photo post doesn’t curate a vibe; it overloads it. There was something nice about the previous limitations. Having a set limit, like the old 10-photo maximum, was actually a good creative constraint. It was generous enough to allow for expression but still required some curation. It reminds me of when X, back then Twitter, doubled its character limit from 140 to 280 in 2017. Sure, longer tweets were possible, but the truly witty ones were, and still are, short and sweet. Aesthetics aside, these mega-posts are just clogging up our feeds. To quote The New Yorker again, “I don’t have time to flip through monthly recaps of the lives of everyone I follow at once!”
So, next time you’re about to post on Instagram, consider if the “vibe” you’re putting out is actually just overwhelming and uninspired. Because that’s often what these 20-photo posts feel like: annoying and lacking in creativity. It’s unclear how long the photo dump trend will last, but until it fades away, let’s try to be considerate social media neighbors and respect each other’s time and attention spans. Just because Instagram now lets you post 20 photos, doesn’t automatically mean you should.
