Am I using Instagram wrong?

Recently, I set up a new page for my travel/motorbike adventures, I was trying something different until someone told me I was using Instagram wrong.

It worked for a while!

For many years, I have been a portrait photographer and either the square or portrait crop worked ace for me. Then, I moved to Ireland and really got stuck in my landscape and travel photography. The crops that IG offered, just like my portrait stuff worked perfectly fine for most of the images I make, such as my abandoned houses project. All was good!

The problem

Panoramas are great. Like many people, I enjoy the super wide crops. They look amazing printed big and they really can bring a whole vista together. I shoot mine on a Fujifilm 50r or 50s and stitch them together using Photoshop. The color grading process is mostly handled by the powerful Infinite Colour Panel. Anyways, all was was fine until I wanted to share some panoramas of the Wild Atlantic Way that I had made on Instagram. The problem is, how to do you fit images like the ones below on to Instagram. They are so long that they really cannot be posted on IG in any meaningful way.

The solution that I decided to test out was splitting up the images into three sections. When making the panoramas, (some of them being made up of 6 or 7 images from a GFX50r) I had to be quite careful with working out what ratio I wanted the final images. I went with a 3:1 crop for most of them but some just didn’t fit (like the ones above). Images that could fit into a 3:1 crop I planned to share on social media.

For example, this image was cut into three 1:1 square section.

This is what it looks like on my Exploring Photography IG feed.

The feedback

So.. then, I asked some friends via Facebook what they thought of this and the feedback was less than good, to say the least. I totally get all the problems about the posting displaying incorrectly in the main feed and when you stop posting in three’s the feed looks super messed up. So.. my question is this, is splitting up an image and posting like this using Instagram wrong? I was even told that some people hate this process so much, they just instantly unfollow people if they do it. Are this just people being over reactive or is this a real problem?

Let me know. I am really interested to hear what people think and if there is a better way to display super wide format images on IG?

Maybe one day we will have a range of formats and crops we can use and the IG kinda just auto-fills it’s own feed with shapes and crops that fit like a jigsaw puzzle or something. Maybe even round crops, who knows. One route might be to just multiple images into one post, so you have to scroll across is, but then you only see the left-hand bit of any given image in a feed… is that a good workaround?

What do you think?