Instagram Is Killing Photo Maps (mashable.com)

Instagram is dropping the Photo Map feature from its service. The feature allowed one to see where a person took a photo. The company began removing the feature, it confirmed to Mashable. The social networking service added that it is currently focusing on removing maps on profiles of other people, but soon you (that is, if you use the service), will lose access to your own photo map as well. The company said: Photo Map was not widely used, so we've decided to remove the feature and focus on other priorities.

Comments

I bet it was a security issue

[gurps_npc]

Frankly, telling people where photos are taken has some major risks.

Oh look, that guy posted a pic of his 16 year old daughter in their pool!

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[Luthair]

Yea, as a non-instagram user I always wondered why they had it from a stalker perspective. That said, it would be trivial to fix by moving the location to the city center.

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[LeftCoastThinker]

This exactly. There is never a good reason to geo tag your family photos. This feature should be off by default and have a pop up warning every time you use your camera if it is enabled. Companies like Facebook and Google love the geo tagging because it lets them further spy on their users, but for the rest of us it is just a bad idea...

Re:I bet it was a security issue

[SeaFox]

Frankly, telling people where photos are taken has some major risks.

Oh look, that guy posted a pic of his 16 year old daughter in their pool!

While I can see your angle this feels -- highly paranoid? People that worried about that their families need to get over themselves. If they think their family is that juicy a target they need to stop partaking in social media at all. Do these same people make their daughters wear burqas when they go out in public as well? Not for religious reasons, but a great way to hide that they have a teenage girl?

Modern Terminology Confusion

[SuperKendall]

Instagram is Killing Photo Maps

Finally! Someone is doing an amazing job of integrating maps with photos!

Instagram is dropping the Photo Map feature from its service.

Oh.

Re: Modern Terminology Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of a bear, or a manatee? Care to explain, since you are obviously so deeply rooted in the community?

You can tell they're a farcebook company

[Anonymous Coward]

We've created a great new feature!
And then removed it because it's useful and we want to dumb you down.

Instagram?

[umghhh]

What is that?

Or they did not want to build geofencing?

[MastaBaba]

Perhaps they want to drop the feature because they don't want to build geofencing into the service?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh.. it's just that whenever a site claims it's "social networking" it becomes doomed to not being very social. That's why Facebook was never able to get any significant amount of social content.

Meanwhile, here on Slashdot... since this isn't "social," we sometimes get into real conversations (though also a lot of stupid flames and trolling) and I run into various people I've been chatting-with, off-and-on, since around the turn-of-the-century. Thank Knuth that Slashdot never went social, so we're still able to socialize here.

killing maps, burning books...

[farialima]

I just stumbled on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (China's censorship on maps)

and I suddenly realized how deleting maps is as close as you can get from burning books nowadays: textual information rarely entirely disappears from the internet (copy-paste too easy :) ), but non-textual, non-image based, information -- in particularly maps -- easily does...

still GPS tagged ?

[johnjones]

so after killing the map are the photo's going to be scrubbed of GPS/Location data ?
going forward ?

any information ?

John

Must Be Simple

[theshowmecanuck]

I'm just hoping they'll implement a rotate feature so we can turn our phones on their side some day to look at pictures in portrait mode better. I must be simple. I generally keep location services turned off on my devices at all times, so don't worry or care about the maps feature. The portrait mode/rotate feature is one of the main reasons I also share on Flickr. Their presentation is much better, even if it is overly complex to use.