I love Instagram. It’s tied with Pinterest as my favorite social media site. It’s such a fun way to see what everyone is up to and you can “heart” photos you like, similar to Facebook’s thumbs up. While there may be the occasional photo of a spider or someone’s foot in a cast, people aren’t likely to heart these things therefore sharing cute, delicious, beautiful, and fun photos is much more popular, which is what makes it such a happy platform.
After hearing the news that Instagram added video I have to say that my first experience with it could have gone better. I was scrolling through my feed as usual when, what I thought was a picture, suddenly started blasting music so loud it made me jump. I realized it was a video and was intrigued, but the music was so abrasive I scrolled quickly past to escape it instead.
I wasn’t happy that videos autoplayed because you just never know what people are posting and what audio is going to be in the background. I like to keep my social media on the side of ‘safe for work.’
However, I wasn’t ready to give my beloved Instagram the boot just yet. I decided to check my settings to see if there was a way to turn off autoplay. I’m excited to share that there is and that it’s a quick fix.
Here’s the steps to turn off Instagram Video Autoplay:
Open up your Instagram account and click the bottom right corner to go to your profile. Then on your iPhone click the Gear Icon for your Settings (if you’re on Android hit the three dot button in the upper right).
Next scroll down to Preferences. Here you will find Auto-Play Videos. Slide the bar to Off.
There you go! That’s it. Now you can view your Instagram feed as a stream of photos. When a video is available you can tap it to play if you are interested.
This makes me extremely happy and I think with autoplay turned off, the video option is a fun feature. Video length is 15 seconds which I enjoy more than Vine’s choppy 6 seconds. I like that I can pick and choose which videos I want to watch. Video will be an interesting addition to Instagram and I’m looking forward to seeing how everyone starts using it.
What about you? Do you use Instagram? If so follow me at 2 Wired 2 Tired. Do you like that it now offers video?
