Prepare your cat photos, Instagrammers.
The photo-sharing platform has long compressed images in its applications so they are small and easy to load, but it will soon bump up photo resolution, improving image quality across the platform.
An Instagram spokesperson confirmed to Mashable it is rolling out 1080 x 1080 resolution pictures across iOS and Android, up from its 640 x 640 pixel resolution requirement. That means Instagram photos are about to be bigger and more beautiful than ever.
The possibility of the enhancement was first reported by The Verge.
You should already see photos with increased resolution on Instagram's apps, though the photos are still displaying in their old format on the web.
The new size brings a number clear advantages. At 1080 pixels, users can see more detail -- which likely won't come at the cost of slower load times or data usage. Cropping an image that's already 1920 x 1080 resolution also makes it easier to post, since some of the length is already cut off.
When Instagram launched in the fall of 2010, mobile photography was in a much different place. Photos needed to be smaller so they could load more quickly, as most phones used a slower 3G connection to the internet. A photo's details would be lost, but smartphone screens were smaller and less pixel-dense, so it was harder to tell what you were missing.
But now, most mobile devices have screens that span 6 inches and resolutions that surpass full-size televisions. Beautiful photos are being handicapped by the 640 x 640 resolution, so the move is a big step in the right direction.
Mashable compared the two resolutions with photos in our own Instagram feed. The higher-res shots look more crisp, but there isn't exactly a world of difference between the two sizes. The first photo displays the larger size; the second (embedded) Instagram photo shows the old size.
A photo posted by Mashable (@mashable) on Jul 4, 2015 at 6:51am PDT
A photo posted by Mashable (@mashable) on Jul 2, 2015 at 4:46pm PDT
The takeaway: Instagram photos will be bigger and more beautiful than ever.