Nerve Endings Firing Away

Update: This seems to have been quietly fixed on Facebook now.

There are two ways you can ‘like’ a photo on Facebook when shared with Instagram. One is when you click the photo to enlarge it and click on ‘like’ and the second is when you just click ‘like’ in your News Feed without enlarging the photo. Strange, right? Especially since both ‘likes’ are for the same photo.

Instagram lets you connect to Facebook and share your photos on your Timeline the same time you publish it on Instagram. You can also go back to a photo in your Instgram and click Share on Facebook and enter a different caption than the one you used on your original image within Instagram. These two methods worked seamlessly before but nowadays are at best unreliable. You choose to share on Facebook and for hours nothing shows up on Facebook so you go back to Instagram and explicitly share again and now two copies show up. At other times, the first method works as advertised.

Back to the original problem of two sets of ‘likes’ on the same photo. Facebook changed the way Instagram photos showed up on the News Feed. Earlier it just showed up as a photo upload and marked it as Via Instagram just like it would if you uploaded it using iPhoto or Lightroom on your desktop. Now it classifies Instagram as an app and says, ‘XYZ took a photo with Instagram’ with XYZ, photo, and Instagram all hyperlinked. So if you like this ‘activity,’ you end up liking only this activity that has one photo, akin to liking an album versus liking a photo in that album. Only if you click the photo, you end up liking the actual photo. People in a hurry end up liking the Instagram activity involving just one photo whereas others like the photo. But strangely, those two types of ‘likes’ never meet.

Why would Facebook make this so confusing? If only they bought Instagram and made photos uploaded via the app, part of Facebook…oh wait!