There are a number of compelling Instagram alternatives out there nowadays, from federated examples like Pixelfed to Glass and Foto.
Foto has proved especially popular as a grassroots platform, but with only a couple of people working on it in their own personal time, new features have been slow to arrive. It’s a monumental load of work, of course – especially when you consider that there are apps for both Android and iOS.
I use Foto on-and-off, but one of the pain points for me has been that you can only share one photo in a post, which is fairly unusual in a modern context and weirdly irritating for me. Perhaps it’s an ADHD thing…
The team have partly addressed that this week with the launch of Portfolios, allowing you to upload multiple images to a post, rearrange the images and update the post over time, and so on.
They don’t have a blog, so you can read the details from their newsletter in the PDF I’ve attached.
I’ll confess though that I don’t love the Portfolios feature as any sort of solution to multiple images in a post – but in fairness, I don’t think they’ve specifically said this is how they’ll serve users who want that capability.
I’m one of those who do want that, and obviously this ain’t it. Because… a portfolio is, by its nature, a showcase for your best work. So this feature doesn’t really resolve the inability to include multiple images in a single post, unless one is happy to overload their profile page with dozens of ‘portfolio’ posts.
Still, if one views Foto as a more photographer-focused app rather than a direct rival to Instagram (in its pre-Reels, fun-focused form), I suppose it’s great.
And, ultimately, no single app can please everybody!