As long as your account is public, Instagram will soon allow anyone on the platform to remix your fresh photographs. There will be an option to disable remixing, but you will have to deliberately opt out once the option is available – it will be enabled by default.
Instagram says it will introduce the ability to “remix” public photographs for usage inside Reels, its TikTok-like video service, in the “coming weeks.” The shift is intended to give Reels creators more stuff to work with as the firm goes all-in on short-form video in the hopes of keeping up with its explosively successful competitor.
According to Devi Narasimhan, a Meta spokesman, remixing will be enabled by default, but Instagram will provide options to turn it off. Through the settings menu, users will be able to disable remixing on individual photographs or at the account level. Any images posted previous to the feature’s launch will have remixing disabled by default, but you will be able to enable remixing for individual posts if you like.
This is identical to the technique Instagram adopted when it opened up all public videos for remixing in January, only allowing footage published after the change to be remixed.
Photographers have long been wary of Instagram’s management of their images, and today’s shift — and the lack of options or answers surrounding it — are unlikely to help the corporation. Back in 2012, a change to the app’s terms of service sparked fears that the firm would be allowed to sell users’ images (it couldn’t), but similar fears have persisted practically every time the app’s terms of service are altered. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri recently announced that the service is “no longer a photo sharing app.”
Remixing could help photographers’ work reach more people — but it could also put their work in situations they don’t want to see it in, so I’d expect a lot of people to turn off the remix switch.
