As popular as Instagram has been since its arrival and despite its buyout by Facebook, the app and service’s biggest feature is also its biggest limitation. Offering a way for people to post square, relatively low resolution photos, Instagram is never going to be home to large, high quality photographs.
A byproduct of that is the fact that the images can be a little on the miniature side. The lack of any sort of zoom feature makes sense considering that limited resolution but that doesn’t help you if you just can’t see what the photo is supposed to be of. Sometimes a little zoom would go a long way.
So with that in mind, this little tip makes a lot of sense and it involves using one of iOS’s built-in accessibility features.
To make this work, you’ll need to head over to the Accessibility settings area in Settings, hitch is hidden beneath the General option. Now, simply turn on the ‘Zoom’ option and head on over to Instagram.
Kicking off the new zoom feature is just a case of executing a double-tap of the screen using three fingers which, at first at least, will need a little bit of practice. Once you’ve managed it though, pinching will increase the level of the zoom while double-tapping with those three fingers again will turn it off. Nice and simple, we’re sure you’ll agree.
For the sake simplicity, here’s how you’ll go about the whole thing step by step:
Step 1: Navigate to Settings > General > Accessibility and then tap on Zoom.
Step 2: Turn on the Zoom feature.
Step 3: Launch the Instagram app and put in view the image you want to zoom into.
Step 4: Tap with three fingers on the display and you’ll be zoomed in on the subject.
Wasn’t that simple?
This tip of course applies to the entirety of iOS, so you’ll now be able to zoom any app to your heart’s content. It’s obviously particularly useful for Instagram thanks to the app’s reluctance to bring a proper zoom feature to its massive user-base, but it’s worth remembering that you now have the ability to zoom anything you wish.
How about zooming in on those Vine videos too?
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