Lots of folks are furious about Instagram’s recently announced changes to their terms of service. If you’re an Instagram user and don’t want to sign up for the changed TOS, here’s Roberto Baldwin‘s recent Wired How-To on rescuing your Instagram photos and closing your account:
First you’ll want to download all of your photos. Instaport will download your entire Instagram photo library in just a few minutes. Currently the service only offers a zip file download of your photos, although direct export to Flickr and Facebook are in the works.
Once the photos are downloaded, you can upload them to another photo service. Some of the Gadget Lab staff is fond of the new Flickr app and service.
After you’ve removed your photos from Instagram, you can quickly delete your account and pretend you’ve never even heard of Lo-Fi filter.
But once you delete your account, that’s it. Instagram cannot reactivate deactivated accounts and you will not be able to sign up for Instagram later with the same account name.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
Update: Charles Cooper at CNET News:
From the outset, let’s note a couple of points that ought to be abundantly clear to anyone watching the unfolding controversy about the upcoming changes to Instagram’s terms of use.
A) Instagram — and thus by definition, Facebook, the site’s corporate parent — is entirely within its rights to change the terms of use governing how photos uploaded by people using the service get used.
B) Facebook’s management is comprised of incredibly smart folks.
Given that A and B are true, the powers that be who are running the company must either be amazingly tone deaf or crazy as loons.
It’s obviously not the latter, so we’re left with the conclusion that the people at the top, so impressed by the sound of their own voices, have lost touch with the people who helped turn them into gazillionaires — in other words, the users.
