What happens when you upload the same photo to Instagram hundreds of times?

Millions of people turn to the Web daily to document their digital lives, and one of their main resources is posting photos on social networks. The problem is that those platforms do almost nothing to preserve the original quality of images. In fact, they aren't even capable of detecting a previous compression process, so they apply their algorithms over and over. Photographer Janick Entremont took this to the extreme by posting a portrait of himself more than 300 times on Instagram. The final result can only be described as absolute corruption…

"Y'all Got Anymore of Them… Pixels?" The situation is so common that it eventually became a meme. Images, videos and animated GIFs are shared endlessly through a long chain of portals and services that at each step try to optimize their size, destroying their quality.

From a technical point of view, the reason behind this behavior is obvious: Bandwidth is expensive, much more than the user believes. We all appreciate high-resolution images, but it makes no sense to serve a 10-megapixel copy every time someone clicks.

On the other side, we discover that compression algorithms simply don't care. Image they see, image they compress, image they ruin. Photographer Janick Entremont decided to test this on Instagram, a platform with a not-so-good reputation when it comes to preserving quality. What exactly did he do? He took a photo, uploaded it to Instagram, downloaded it, uploaded it again, and downloaded it again… 340 times.

Original

80 uploads

The experiment is not exactly new. I still well remember the work of artist Pete Ashton on his profile "I Am Sitting in Stagram", but the difference is that he stopped at 90 cycles. At the same time, we notice that the quality loss does not follow the same pattern. One hypothesis is that Instagram modified or completely replaced its compression algorithms in the last five years. While in Ashton's photo the "damage" has a horizontal trend, in Entremont's case it is vertical.

340 uploads

Conclusion? The same as half a decade ago: You can share whatever you want on social networks, but do not use them to preserve images. Keep originals locally, or in the raw cloud, as if they were normal files.

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