The Vergecast - The future of photos with Google Pixel camera's product manager and Instagram's director of product

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

Live at The Glass Room in San Francisco, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Ashley Carman are joined by Google Pixel camera product manager Isaac Reynolds and Instagram head of product Robby Stein to talk about how the photos we share influence the photos we take — and vice versa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of the Verge family of websites. That's situation. Is there a dot situation? I'm in friend Eli.

Dieter Bone is here. Hello, hello. Ashley Carmen is here. Hello. And this is actually a really special episode of the Vergecast. We're live at Mozilla's glassroom in San Francisco. We've got a crowd. The crowd is here.

Pretty good. And we have two very special guests. We have Isaac Reynolds from Google. Hello. And Robbie's time from Instagram. Everyone. And we're going to talk about photos. How we make them, how we share them, how we talk about them.

I'm literally, I told both of them earlier. The first question is, what is a photo? And that's just going to take us into the entire night. It is also literally Halloween. Also, it's my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad. That's sweet. Well, I can't say the mean thing.

But the verge also turns 8 on November 1. So it's going to just be, everyone's in a great mood. We're going to have some drinks later. So if you're listening to this in your car and it seems like it's getting a little sideways, just know it was Halloween. Yep. And it's our birthday party. And like, you can't get too mad at us.

Okay, let's start. Isaac and Robbie, I want to ask you both. Robbie, you are the director of product at Instagram. Describe what that entails. Sure. So I support the consumer product team, focus on stories, feed, messaging, and the tools that help you connect and share with people you care about. And so I've been at Instagram for three and a half years. our team originally launched stories.

We've done changes to feed, like the multiple posts to feed, indirect messages, being able to share photos more easily, creative tools with the camera, like Super Zoom and boomerang, so all that fun stuff. And Isaac, you're the product manager of the pixel camera? Right. So I'm the lead product manager on the pixel camera focused on software. So I helped the team put together a roadmap for the coming years of what we're going to do in computational photography

and try to change how people think about taking photos and taking videos and things like that. So having the two of you together on a stage at this conversation is particularly interesting to me. I'm very excited about it. First of all, we're just in the moment in the tech cycle where all the cameras came out. And so it's always like a moment that prompts me to think about photos. And then I think the feedback loop of the tools we use to create the photos and then we share them and you see trends across platforms like Instagram feeding back into the creative tools, there's not like a verger thing. Like that's the project. I think we started the entire site. It's our birthday. I'm being very

interesting. Happy birthday. But that's like why we have it. That's like why we made the thing is these tools help us democratize creation. So I'm very excited to have you both here together. And I do want to start with this photo, with this question that is it sounds a little silly, and it's a little philosophical. It is extremely

Dieterbone. Hi, everybody. But the very nature of what a photo is has changed. It's changed both in how you are creating them with computational photography. We're no longer capturing one instant in time. capturing like several slices and then he's just smiling me he's like it's a photo it's nuanced yeah and then Robbie like Instagram just at its core is filters and

AR effects and like the very notion that the first thing you create is just a straight photo is like you're way off on the other end of the spectrum so I was like let's start with you what is a photo do you take photos do you make them I never take photos actually I was going to say if I had to boil it down just a couple of words I would probably say that a photo is a memory more than anything else. Aw. So we focus it on... Wow.

It's very nice. It's not a sarcastic awe. I really do like that. I was serious. It's about reminiscing and remembering and capturing moments forever that maybe you couldn't capture before. So NightSight, for example,

are kind of very, very ultra-low-light mode. And one of the reasons I love it is because it lets people take pictures they never could before, which to me is a memory you never could have had before. It's a memory that would have deteriorated over the years. That is very extremely depressing the existence.

But now with pixel. All right, Robbie, what's a photo? Well, I think I'll give you the Instagram answer, which I think from an Instagram perspective, and this is something that, how I view photos personally, it's the best way to capture and share what you're doing, thinking, and feeling. And I think for us and for me and like how I use photos

probably more times than not, it's actually for the purpose of sharing and communicating information. When I think of a, I think when most people think of a photo, they're like, push the shutter, we like slice, like capture it, that moment is frozen. But Isaac, like that is no longer what anyone is doing in computational photography. You're taking several slices of time. You're merging them together.

Do you think that has changed your understanding of what the actual final product is as a photo? Do you think people need to think about it differently? I don't think so. And the reason is because, At the end of the day, we take all these images together, and we pick one of them to be the photo. And when we merge all the other photos into that one,

we keep that base, we called a base frame. And that moment in time really happened. It was completely real. And all the other images that we merge into it just go to making that cleaner, sharper, look nicer. Enhancing reality. Improving reality. You see where it gets fuzzy?

It could get fuzzy. Yeah. I'll give you one way it could get really fuzzy in the future. which is if you know what a thing was supposed to look like, it can help you denoise the image that you took of that thing and make it look sharper. Is it cheating to take away the noise because you know it's noise? The noise itself is not the photo,

and you had to know what the photo was supposed to look like to take the noise away, but that doesn't make it fake. So there's a whole, there's a huge amount of computation and nuance that goes into the image that you get, and it's definitely a fine line that we try to walk. Is there a far boundary that you won't cross? Ooh. Like, for example, I know that I'm very handsome.

My camera seems awfully confused about how handsome I'm. Yeah, there are certainly lines that we won't cross. We at Google as a company think it's important to worry about a face retouching and beautification. There are certain lines in there that we won't cross. Like, we want everyone to look like the most authentic and best version of themselves, which doesn't mean modifying people. But how do you balance people's need to look good in their selfies? Like, I want to look good.

You do look good, right? And if I'm going to share it to Instagram, like, and Instagram is willing to make me look better, how do you kind of think about? Well, this is where the interface between an app like Instagram and an app like a pixel camera comes into play. Because a lot of our responsibility is to put a file on disk that is really flexible and useful to whatever editor, whatever platform, whatever device or display or screen is going to see. see it next. So we focus on low light, detail, dynamic range, color accuracy, and giving you the most flexible thing you can work with later on. So Robbie, is that how you think of it too? Because

you, on the other hand, it's the first thing you do in Instagram is at it. Right? The assumption, I think that you probably have is that people are going to start modifying the image. So do you have a far line or is there like, we just know it's going to happen? Yeah. I mean, I think for us we want to, like the point of the Instagram camera is to share and communicate what you're doing with you're thinking and what you're feeling. And so we want to inspire you to be able to share and connect, feel comfortable doing that, and be able to actually interact with people. And what we do is we take the core use cases of why people use our camera,

and a lot of times they're actually communicating feelings and emotions. So it's things like, I love this, or, wow, this is awesome. And so what we'll do is we'll use AR and inject, like, in super zoom, like the multiple hearts that, like, zoom in slowly with, like, a twinkle music. And it's like, wow, I'm obsessed with this thing. So for us, it's about the expressive and emotional aspects of the camera that we try to do. And we kind of focus on those use cases much more than all the fine-grained things around kind of how you look. So if you're thinking of photos primarily as a mode of communication and expression, does that mean that you're just not really, you don't have any stress about whether or not the photo represents like a documentary truth of a moment in time because the whole purpose of it is to modify it and send it out?

No, I think we do care about what it looks like. the point of the share is that you want to bring someone close to you and say, oh, I felt like I was with you when you were eating that pizza. I was with you and you were really angry when your sports team lost the World Series. Mine actually won, I was very happy. You just work that right in there. But you want to feel authentic because you want to really feel connected. Like you were there with your friend, basically, through the camera.

So it does matter to us. We do look at camera quality. We do look at overall quality of the photo. And we do a bunch to make it faster and make it feel like, something that represents the moment you had. What's the feeling that people are trying to communicate when they use a photo that just make, or use a filter that makes them look really good?

It could be playful, just like I'm feeling goofy or bored or sometimes just a post to get a reply from someone and then start a conversation on direct because like you just want to hang and you're bored. See that all the time from users. They talk about that pretty frequently. Or they'll just post and say like, I'm bored, hit me up. So one thing I have been thinking about a lot

as we kind of review this next generation of cameras and phones in particular, is that the pixel has a very obvious look. Like, I'm pretty consistent. I can spot the pixel photo out of, like, when we do our photo test. I can always tell which one is a pixel. It's contrasty. It has really unusual colors. It's great.

You dig it. Good. I like your camera. We're done here. That's it. But it's a very clear look. And we were talking to Mark LaVoy at the recent hardware. event. He said, we know we have a look. This year, we change the look a little bit.

Instagram is like all trends and looks all the time. Like, it's moving ever faster. Where do you see that feedback loop coming when you want to change the look of a pixel camera year to year? What drives that? Is it, okay, we know that this look is popular on the social platforms. Is it we instinctively want to change it ourselves? Is it Annie Leibowitz yelled at us a lot? Which happened, by the way. That's what my... That's some really the answer I'm hoping for here. is like a long digression on A Leewood's like yelling at the pixel team. But like what are the inputs for you when you, because you're only changing it year to year, whereas I see on Instagram it's like week to week.

Well, users are the big input. That's why I like to come places like this. I get to learn what users want. But to be honest, when you build the camera, you kind of become a little bit of a taste maker. So all the people out there who shoot with pixel and share their pixel photos are creating almost virally that look. And the people who shoot with pixel for years become attached to that. that look. So we take a role as tastemakers very, very seriously. We have a team of people who are

very, very deeply embedded in image quality. And, you know, part of that is noise in detail, and part of that is the subjective look that you're talking about. We call it the signature look. I think Mark likes to say it's based on his own personal love for, and I'm going to mispronounce this, Caravaggio, the paintings, a very deep, moody, dark, beautiful look. It happens to look really good for landscapes in particular in sunsets. But when we'll be go out and change it, it's usually because we've heard some strong feedback that, you know, maybe this look works in some place, but not another place. And so one of the things that we're learning to do is treat different images differently, different parts of images differently,

to try to make sure that everything gets the style that it should and deserves, even when, you know, half the photos is a beautiful sunset and half the photos of a portrait. But I don't know, the pixel two came out. It was the first, you know, really aggressive HDR camera in that way. First really successful computational photography camera. Obviously, Apple followed. Like, the HDR look where everything is very flat and the shadows are brought up and the highlights were dropped down. Like, that just became what photos looked like. That is not what photos have, like everyone's photos didn't look like that until the pixel two and sort of the Apple phones came out. Did you think, oh, crap, we changed how people think about photos? Like, did you have

that moment of the feedback loop in the world as most photos and how are, this much flatter? I think it was more, this is cool. Yeah, you're like, Eric, I'm on the winning team. We weren't so happy about the flat look. Yeah. So one of the reasons HDR Plus,

that signature look is so moody is because we didn't want that flat look. Yeah. And HDR Plus, I don't think, has ever had that flat look. That flat look is associated with the traditional HDR bracketing algorithms of yesteryear.

And it's something we designed HDR Plus not to do from the outset. So I think it's really cool that software is now becoming much bigger part of image processing. We're glad to be a part of it. We're allowed to have helped kick it off, but not that flat look. We're not a fan of that. So Robbie, you also, obviously people use your camera. Do you ever think, oh, we need to build an HDR pipeline in this camera. We need to have a signature look for the Instagram app. Or is it you're going to put freckles on your face even though you don't have freckles? Like, let's just get it done.

I mean, I think there's a certain amount of standardization you want just because people have a need to feel like they're more reliably getting the same enjoyment from a product over and over again, and so you don't want to depart too far because it's confusing and frustrating to people. I think that Instagram, based on the filter style that we do have, there's a consistent palette and transparency instead of kind of colors that we typically do use, like even for the swipeover filters, that have a, they're in the same language. I think you'll notice when you use, like, the Rio filter and it's got that, like, pink kind of semi-transparent gradient. And people recognize that. And I do think that's important for kind of the reason.

I mentioned. But we actually just redesigned our camera just a couple months ago and just did a launch with a whole bunch of new effects that are now discoverable with AR and the new formats like super zoom and boomerang. And we're starting to see that actually the formats are also as distinctive as any of the color as well. So when you see the boomerang looping GIF or you see the like funny like zoom into the face of your friend, like you know it's Instagram. And I think it's because we built something that matters and when people use it, they get a certain joy out of it. we think it's important to keep that consistency long term so that people have an expectation that's still there.

How do you think about the cadence of creating those effects and even the camera releases? Because pixels and iPhones generally are like about once a year, there'll be a big jump forward. And you are doing stuff once a week or once every two weeks. Yeah. I mean, for us, we're not really trying to recreate the core underlying camera, but more extending it in interesting ways. And it just works through the use cases of why would you want to use Instagram?

And ultimately, the point of Instagram is to connect. and, you know, be brought closer to the people that really matter to you. And if that's expressing a certain feeling or a certain mood, we can just build something on top of the camera as fast as we want. And so when we built the original version of Super Zoom, we were like people really express humor through the camera. Like, it's really used to be funny. But yet no one's really created a product that helps you be really, really funny all the time

through the camera. And so we were like, okay, let's try this weird Zoom thing that took this kind of kung fu video shot, and we actually watched a bunch of YouTube videos of like these old school, like, kung fu video kind of funny mock zoom ins where you, like, miss your friend intentionally, and then it like cuts back over. And we're like, this is actually pretty funny. A dramatic chipmunk was like another version of it.

So we built it, we prototyped it, and we just shipped it. And then completely independent of any release cycle of like an underlying camera technology. I feel like Super Zoom came about, though, originally from users doing the like quick finger up Zoom. Like who, who do you think is the stronger tastemaker on Instagram? Are you watching what the users are doing and then deciding, or are you guys going completely off on your own doing research thinking about? Users are really, really critical to what we build.

And I think we did notice that people would zoom in very quickly. But the specific example of super zoom was probably, because it has more humor associated with it, it was probably just less about that zooming motion, but more that people wanted to express that something was funny. And then the other one was we just saw that people were adding all of these hearts and hard eyes into every single camera. Like, wow, people keep using the camera

to basically express, I love this thing. Like, this is epic, like, whatever it is. And so we should build a whole bunch of tools and make that much more expressive with the camera. And then we got to the Zuperozoom, hearts experiences and hard eyes and a bunch of the other AR filters that we added. Am I allowed to comment as well?

My dream is that YouTube just talk to each other and we just sit back. Go ahead. Yeah. No, I was going to say, you talk about people zooming in when they're taking Instagram videos, and they're zooming in really fast.

You zoom in a little bit, come back a little. You know, the Instagram, not the Instagram, but the dramatic chipmunk look. You know, people use the pixel default camera very differently from that. From us, when you pinch zoom in and you go too far and you have to come back, or you go a little bit to the right and you miss the subject and you have to pan it back to the left. For us, that's like embedded in your memory forever now. Like, you can never remake that video.

It's done. It's in bits now. It can't be changed. So we see that as like this horrible mistake. But it's funny. so this gets I mean this is like the heart of it one of the notes we have

is like what are the jobs that these apps do that these cameras do and it seems like you have identified two very different jobs but there's a pretty clear overlap which is the Instagram grid right which is okay

this is my most perfect photo I'm sharing it gaze upon the identity that I've constructed pay me to hog your products yeah no I've got a perfect Instagram presence but like that's the Instagram grid in particular is where you want your your best stuff do you see people using your camera for that or are they using the create mode for stories they do both but I think our cameras use more for stories because our tool set is so geared to the job of sharing in the way where you're using the camera specifically to share this moment and this expression and this feeling and it's funny that you said that oh this is a terrible mistake because you want to relive this moment and this moment doesn't exist for stories producer you're like I want to put something on my

my stories, I, like, never want to see that thing again. Like, I don't, I don't want to remember it. I, like, I mean, sometimes embarrassed that's there, and it's great. It's ephemeral and it goes away because I'm just sharing a really goofy moment where I was just, I was bored and I was eating something. I was like, oh, this is going to be stupid, but I'm just going to put this on stories. And I got a bunch of people right back to me. I got to connect with people I wouldn't have spoken to, and that was the purpose of using the

camera. It was never to have this artifact that I was going to treasure. But do you find that people go back to the archive? They do. And I think because of... I look at my story. That's a very personal question. Well, the thing is that there's a lot of diversity in these cases.

And people use stories when they're at a wedding and they're taking a bunch of stories throughout and those are really fun things or you're going for a walk or it's beautiful. I do all kinds of stuff. But there's certainly a class of stories that are like, you just don't worry about, you're just putting them on there. But for Fita, I agree.

That one is much more about highlights and about this kind of sense of this memory and memorialization of the things that you're into. And if someone's never met you before, what would they think about you, what would they know about you, what should they know about you? And you get a very quick sense, like, okay, you have your kids or at least mine, kids and travel and food and family, those are the things that are really important to me. And there are two different jobs that live in one product for us.

We have to ask. Do it? I mean, Ashley, she's been waiting to ask this question all day. Did stories destroy the grid? Is anyone still using the grid? I use the grid. Okay, you use the grid. Maybe at least two users.

Other than that one extraordinarily important user of the grid. Yes, people love the grid. They really do. People love their profile and the grid. I think for a lot of people, it is the main way, their main representation of themselves on the internet. Like, it really is. And if you've never met me before or where you go to school together, you go to my Instagram profile and you get a quick sense of who I am. And it really matters to people. So people do still spend a lot of time thinking about it and they really enjoy it. But do you see in the sort of your daily usage numbers the shift towards stories? I mean, stories is definitely a place that can accommodate. more use cases because it's just this kind of effortless place where you don't have to think too much about it, you just post. And so you definitely see much more of like the everyday casual use case, which was the purpose of stories. And when we originally launched it, it was because we realized people were having to be so considered in feed and it was too

difficult to really like, well, is this really like some good enough to go on feed and then be on my grid and live on forever? Like, man, maybe not. And so we do see a lot, a lot of casual usage on stories. Do you, so when you open the, it's create mode, when you slide over? Just camera. Camera. So that's the video camera. Do you think, oh, we got a, this needs to start being a 4K video camera.

This needs to be a super high-end video camera. Or are you more focused on the creative tools on top of it? Well, it gets back to the jobs. You know, why is someone hiring the Instagram camera? And if it's ultimately to communicate. Wait, can I stop you? Do you all know Silicon Valley product manager speak? That's how they all talk.

Oh, yeah. I'll explain the job then. Every single one of you is hiring a software product every day. There's no HR department. can fire the software product at will. You know, it's a face evidence. You can fire one, too, though. You can.

You can fire whatever you want. It's very liberating. I encourage everyone to fire two products tonight. But preferably not Instagram products. Anyway, keep going. Anyway, so the jobs thing is like, it's just helpful to think about not people using products, but they hire it to do something for them.

And it helps you just think, okay, people wanting to get something out of the product. That's why they're using it. And for us, it's not to get this crazy, dense memory that you're going to relive and think about all the time. It's again, it's just to communicate something kind of sometimes really goofy and sometimes completely like you don't ever want to see again. So 4K is not something that we focus a ton on and probably won't in the short term. Are most people using effects on their stories?

I'm getting in the sense that reality is really boring for you guys. Well, this is a split, right? I mean, here we're like, we're going to enhance reality. It's not boring. It's just the, I think when you're trying to express something, part of it's the photo, part of it's, well, what am I thinking about it? You put a little gift thing in there that's fun and that explains how excited you are about something. It communicates more than just a smile is not good enough anymore. So, Isaac, how much are you thinking about the things that are happening to these photos when you're thinking about how to process a photo?

Because when, like, there's going to be an output, right? It's going to get saved in Google photos. It's going to get sent as an MMS that is crushed and terrible and awful. Did you know, would you like to talk about RCS now? No, no, I wouldn't. Or like, it's going to go into Instagram and it's going to, you know, maybe if you're lucky, you'll go on a story or might go on the grid. How much are you thinking about those outputs

when you're trying to save your ideal bits to disk? It's definitely on our list. But actually, what's bigger on our list, which is funny to hear you, Robbie, talk about the feed versus the stories. Because as much as you talk about the feed being really hard to deal with and lots of effort and lots of investment, like I would be very happy if your Google Photos grid was your feed because you only had to take one photo in each situation

and that photo was incredible and you didn't have to work for it. I would be very happy if that were the reality but you can make a button that makes that maybe one tap share extensions oh my god this is my dream

can we negotiate this right here right now we're gonna be a just get a whiteboard and like make a new thing we'll get 20 minutes we'll be back is that cool exactly but in terms of how we think about where the photo's going the biggest thing for us is all the detail has to be there because we always say

it's really easy to take detail away and cover it up with something else like Red Hearts. But it's really hard to add the detail back if it wasn't there in the beginning. So one of my least favorite sort of responses to how nerdy I am about photos and our reviews is it doesn't matter, it's just going on Instagram. You don't have to, like, crop into the photos as closely as you do and be like, these five pixels are sharper on this photo and this camera versus the other, because it's just going on Instagram. One, I personally find that frustrating because the photos live for much longer than a phone.

So I prefer to always have the best photo because it's going to hopefully transcend this moment in time. And second, I'm pretty sure that you guys are going back in improving the display of photos in the archive over time. So I actually, is that true? Do you think about this photo from 2012, we should actually recompress it to make it better versus the input that we have? versus the input that we have, or is that just lost to the mists? No, I mean, I think we're uploading what we think is the best trade-off between being able to upload it relatively quickly, not kill your battery, and get it to people that want to see it.

And then at the time, those parameters just change based on the quality of the camera, phone, bandwidth. And so if you go back to your Instagram, we're in your old stuff, it's going to look a little jankier. But that's staying static. You're not ever improving that stuff. Not that I'm aware. I've been surprised how many layers of software

there actually are going on there. trans coders, so you basically have a file in a server and somehow that has to become a file on your phone. And to do that, you have to turn it into some other kind of file, send it over an internet connection, turn it into some other kind of file and then show it on a screen which has its own code in it. All those, there's a shocking number of layers and transformations that happen. And even something as simple as taking a lower-rise image and turning into a high-rise image, which is something called upscaling. There are really simple ways to do that and there are really incredibly advanced ways to do that.

And so, like, in pixel camera, we have a range of upscalers for all sorts of different purposes. But if you feel like the photos are getting better in the archive, it may simply be there's some software layer running on the phone that is, like, completely invisible to Instagram that is magically making them better through better upscaling. Do you think about Instagram as an output

as you are planning out camera features? Are you thinking most people are just going to share about? What are the things, what are the sort of metrics of this is happening in Instagram that influences what you guys are doing? Well, the biggest thing is just we know that people are going to be using Instagram camera. We know they're going to be sending our photos there. So I'll give you a very concrete example. We think a lot about like aspect ratios is one big thing.

This is so after my own heart. We're going to do an hour on this, please. In Pixel 4, we actually moved the controller of the aspect ratio from deep, deep in settings, much, much closer to the user. And the reason for that was because your feed has a particular aspect ratio, which is different from your story's aspect ratio. Ooh. And that... Sorry. The internet is like

Aditing products five minutes to break us up already. But it is very important when you take the photo to know whether it's going to go on the feed

where it's square or stories where it's not square. Or sometimes in your grid it's square, like when you're looking through your own grid on the feed,

it's square. But when you look at it like scroll through other people's photos, they can be varying degrees of rectangular. So, when we were trying to make a decision about what aspect ratios should we have,

should it be full screen, or 16 by 9, or 4 by 3, or 2 by 3, or 1 by 1, or circle, like crazy number of ratios, I actually went, and I looked at all the ratios, and I took a single picture in that ratio, and I cropped it to all the different ways that could show up on Instagram, and that is how we picked what should be the ratios that we offer on the camera, and which one should be the default, because I wanted to make sure that when you took a picture it was going to look at it on Instagram. That's really nice. See?

You're welcome. Dieter's still going to try to start shit. By the way, it's for my customers, too. Truly, there's no more Vergecast moment than like we're trying to start some aspect ratio, like beef right now. Like, there's, like, this room

is like, do it. And then like everyone else in the world is like, what on earth so you introduced some creative controls in the camera this year with the HDR sliders. That's interesting because there's obviously stuff you're choosing it capture. But then because it's computational photography, there's stuff, you're

you can change after capture. How do you think about the sort of, is there a final file or is there this ever-changing thing that you can mutate in your zone and you're going to export it to a place like Instagram? There's a sad transition that we have between in-camera and like pre-capture post-capture. Yeah.

Once, so we do all of our processing in what's called a raw file format, which has way more information than like what ends up on the disc that goes to Instagram. And so we try to do all of our processing in that raw file. So we do end up throwing a bunch of detail away So we try to do as much there as we can Because we know that once it makes it place like Instagram There's a lot less flexibility

Because you just have a lot less data in that file to play with So you don't think that Like Apple lets you like change your depth of field After the fact in their portrait mode That lives in their app And then once you're gone Once you're out of their beautiful prison Like you never gets it. It is beautiful

It's very nicely maintained It's fucking prison But once you're out of that, like, you can't change that anymore. That's like a very proprietary. Like, you keep saying disk and that makes me think of file formats. Like, is there a new photo file format that preserves that beyond just raw? That's like, okay, we're going to re-compute. It depends on what you want to preserve.

Like, you actually can modify the blur after the fact for our portrait mode pictures. You can add blur to some pictures that, you know, you haven't taken in portrait mode, if you got the right settings enabled. There's lots you can still do. So you can modify the bouquet. You can turn into a color pop where it's like the subject is color and then everything is not only blurred in the background, but like gray scale as well.

So there are definitely things you can do after the fact and we have special file formats for all that stuff too. But that's inside your app. Do you think that that stuff should go industry-wide so that you export your photo and now the Instagram app can change the bouquet or the Instagram app can do? I would love it if Instagram supported our custom file formats for depth. no thank you for asking that i appreciate that but i mean that's like a i mean to get super nerdy

like the jpeg standard was like a controversial patent like there's all the stuff of we have to make a file format so to go from okay we're going to ship a jpeg after all this processing and then you can have it and you can do whatever you want to now we're adding layers of recompute that maybe you're going to do differently than me that obviously that's a whole process are you are you interested in your camera shipping out a file that can do that? So the editor can do even more with it than just a simple JPEG? Yeah. So if I wanted to take your HDR Plus file and I wanted to do my own computational

photography. All right. So we've got all sorts of outputs in camera for that, for that kind of thing. Like we'll export depth, an actual depth map with every portrait image. So that if you want to modify the blur later, you can do that. If you want to do like a 3D photo, you can do that too. We'll attach a little three-second video clip with each one of the photos. You can do all sorts of cool stuff with that too.

It's actually also got some little stabilization metadata in it as well, which is kind of interesting. It comes from the gyroscope. We've got raw output, so you can actually get this 14-bit HDR-plus raw image that you can put into like a lightroom or a Photoshop or something and do really cool stuff with. So when I talk about, you know, you get an image out of camera, and then it's yours.

We're actually embeddeding a lot more in that image than just the traditional little JPEG. But do you want an ecosystem to develop around that stuff? I mean, it's great that it's all there for you, but if I can't use other editors and tools to make use of it, like, it's just actually eating up the storage from my 64-gibut pixel-4 base model. Right? Sorry.

It's just what I think about. Like, how do you build an ecosystem around that additional data? Well, the nice thing to do is we piggyback off Android a lot. So for example, the depth information that we save with a portrait, it's an Android standard. And the Android folks, they go work with OEM partners, third-party apps such as Instagram, and talk about how this file should work and what you should be able to do with it. And then we just piggyback on that. So Ash and I were talking earlier that Apple and Google, they're like, they're having this horse race

of who can have the best portrait mode. And it seems like Instagram, it's like, man. Did you have a fake portrait mode for a minute? Do you care about portrait mode? Yeah. It's cool. I mean, I think there's so much people use the camera for,

and there's lots of people doing it, that it probably isn't the thing that, like, everyone's using all the time, because there's lots of great solutions for it. But we thought it was really important to support, and people like it that use it. But, yeah. Are there inputs, like, to this other conversation?

Is there data you want from cameras that you're not getting as you think about your future red map? Like, it would be great if when the camera is lit up, we could use these other three sensors. to create a new kind of effect. Like, are you in those conversations, or are you just like, we're going to get what we get

and we're going to do our thing? I think it would be great. I mean, we meet frequently, and I think it would be awesome to get more access to some of the raw information so that we could make it better for the thing you're trying to use it for. Like, low lighting is one thing that comes up all of the time.

It's very frequent on Instagram because in social, point of Instagram cameras, the share stuff mostly. And when you're doing stuff is usually poorly lit in a restaurant or in your room or whatever. And it'd be really interesting

to be able to tune some of those things more directly for that specific use case rather than relying particularly on some output that you have to then just reshare if someone wants to use the native camera as their primary camera. So Snapchat is going all in on this 3D mode using the iPhone's depth sensing.

What's holding you guys back from it as a politics of the deal and accessing the sensors? Why aren't you going in on those filters? I mean, I think we mostly just look at what's going to be the thing that's going to be the most valuable to lots of people And a lot of these more experimental earlier phase things,

we typically like to really make sure they're valuable to people before we put a ton of time and effort into them. People frequently request doing just more advanced camera formats. And we've tried some experiments with them internally, and we've tried testing them and getting some users. But some users don't understand them, they don't capture with them yet. And so we really try to wait until we find something that really is going to help the whole community more.

And we've had other priorities right now. But do you think that not every, like, I think the iPhone 7 is the most popular iPhone on the market right now, it's the most in use? Are you building towards, okay, we know that not everybody actually has the face ID tech. Not everybody has this yet. We're going to curve into that as if there's mass adoption, or are you saying we need to be, this just isn't that important? It's mostly just what we think is going to be most important. I mean, I think if there's something really cutting edge and new that a small group people are starting to use, but we think it will be really big in the future, we'll probably. probably invest more there because we think it'll be really valuable and it's a good investment

and over our time. But otherwise, if it's, we're not sure and we don't have conviction, there are other, there's lots of problems that we really know our problems. We're going to focus on those first. I will say this is kind of a chicken and egg problem. So on my side, it's the person capturing the data and putting a lot of this for apps like Instagram to play with. Kind of the data has to be there for Instagram to do something with it. So there's this, there's this funny setting in pixel, in pixel four that lets you save depth data with every photo that you take. And it's kind of there just in case someone wants to use it. We didn't have the data. No one would use it. So it's there. And there actually are a few good

apps making use of it already. Facebook actually uses it, which is really cool. The news feed does. But we kind of have to lead the industry a little bit on pixel to make sure the data is available for them to even decide if it's worth doing for their customers. How do you, how do you over time decide, okay, we built a new hardware feature in the camera, It's an integrated hardware software product, I get it. But we built a new core feature of the camera. We're going to keep it and keep iterating on it because people are using it versus, well, that was a good idea,

but we're going to drop it and move on the next thing. I think a lot of it comes down to a similar answer. We think about users. What are users using? What are they doing? What are they really connecting with? What gets them more meaningful photos that they love to enjoy later? They love to reminisce.

They love to share. So we look at those things, basically. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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All right. I think we've got a few minutes left, and I want to make sure we get some questions. So now I'm just going to... I'm basically just going to list feature demands of both of you. It's going to sting. It's not a total surprise because I tweeted it, and I know they both saw it.

But like, you're still here, man. You're so on stage, the lights are on. The cameras are pointed. They're channeling. They're waiting for it. Yeah, they're waiting for it. Okay.

Let's hear it. So, Isaac, number one. So much. We talked about Instagram being at this, like, video platform. The pixel is very much an excellent still camera. Why can't it shoot 4K24 or 4K60 video? 4K24 or 4K60? Yeah.

Why can't it do those things? I think the answer is that nobody needs those things. Wow. I shouldn't say nobody. Wow. Don't you all own YouTube? Because I feel like I know some people who really think they need those things. They're very influential.

It's one of the, there, whenever you look at a camera, there's like, there's very strong drop-off. There's some things that everybody does all the time. That's, I open the camera, I press the button, I close the camera. Done. That's like 80% of people, that's 95% of what they do. And then there's 1% of people who wants this crazy other thing, like a raw capture, or 4K60 or something. So we're very much an 80% team. We love simplicity.

We love democratizing photography. We want everyone to be a really confident photographer. And so we focus on those 80% pathways. So if we have time to invest in something, we're going to invest in the default mode, default capture, things that 100% of people use. There are people who really want 4K60, so I think we've heard the feedback loud and clear. So I'm not going to say never, just not right now. Is that something your current phone could support if you needed to put the resources towards it, or is that way to year? You know, it's another one of those nuanced answers because certain components in the phone could support it.

Like, we have enough memory bandwidth to move that 4K60 resolution, right? That part works. other parts don't. And so we could do something like give you a 4K60 that you can only record for a certain number of seconds before it saturates some bandwidth GIP capacity.

But right, that's not going to meet the pixel quality bar. So 4K24 is the other one that everyone asked about, which is, if my math is correct, less than 4K30. So you do 4K30 because you just light up 4K24? Sitting here on stage, I have no particular reason why we could not do 4K-24.

I mean, I'm not, I'm told it's mad science. Oh my God. There's one number is smaller than the other. This whole thing is just a delaying tactic to make sure that Ashley doesn't literally, literally. Ashley's list is way long.

But Robbie, okay, here's the number one we got for Instagram. Better compression. People want higher quality compression. They want more predictable compression inputs and outputs. Is that something you guys are thinking about working. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's something that we constantly trying to tune. It's a really difficult thing to balance because we are all that we hear on one side all the time.

We want my video to be higher quality on the playback. It seems kind of weird and like not quite as good as I'd expect it to be. On the other side, well, if you had a packet loss environment and your battery was about to die and you were in the woods and your thing didn't post, you're like really pissed. And so it's a really, really difficult tradeoff. But we're absolutely, absolutely trying to give you the best possible compression and quality for the conditions you're in. And I think as phones and connectivity gets better, it's just going to improve over time. So we're working on it. It's hard.

We don't get it right every time, but it's definitely something we're working on. Do you think that there should be like an Instagram pro mode? What would you want with it? I mean, these are, there's a lot of transcoding going on as you guys are talking about. Like, is there a mode where you could say, I'm giving you this file, I'm looking for these output settings for display and Instagram? Like you're willing to wait longer and go on Wi-Fi and whatever. It's interesting. Yeah, I don't know.

I probably wouldn't build that today just based on the amount of people that probably want it. But I think that's an interesting idea. All right. What about your idea? Do you really want the digitally remastered profile? Was that a real thing where your things get better over time? I think everybody wants everything to get better over time for free. Does anybody not want that to?

Yeah, that was a cool idea too. That was pretty good. That's cool. All right, Ash. Oh, I mean, this is not about the camera. This is just my beef. Go for it. You know, I bring this up to you every time.

I know. When are you getting rid of red receipts on DMs? We need them gone. We need them gone. They need to be gone. Okay. Thank you for the feedback. Is it a gift.

Am I going to get Instagram pro before she gets? No, I don't know. That is dark. Maybe it comes with Instagram Pro. I don't know. Oh, this is great. But no, it's a really good point. I mean, I think, like, there's lots of ideas like that where frequently we hear this thing is so awesome.

And one of the main reasons I use it is because I finally have transparency into communication. Because the anxiety that people have. Who are these people? I'll tell you. I'll tell you. I'll tell you. So who want to see red receipts? Yes.

People really get worried when they send DMs and, like, people, they don't know if people saw them or not. They're like, oh, did they see them and not right back? Or did they not? And it actually creates, like, a lot of, like, stress for people. and Instagram is in the business of trying to reduce that as much as humanly possible. But I get on the other side, it could create other threats they read and they didn't write back. But at least just transparency. I don't want people to know I read their message.

So just one way, one way to read receipt. Isaac, I don't think this is actually your team specifically, but the Pixel 3 had an ultra-wide front camera. People loved it. And so this is like a very common feature request in the list is why did you take that away from me? is that when you think, this is an integrated product, right? So was your team involved in this vision to put what cameras where?

Yeah, I specialize in the software side, but we're very, very closely connected to hardware for many, many reasons. So the group selfie cam on the pixel three was loved so much that we made the only cam on the pixel four, a group selfie cam. So if you look at the pixel three, they've got a narrow front camera and a very, very wide.

And the one camera on the pixel four, is kind of in between, but it's much, much closer to the wide side. Is this one of those things where you changed it, but now there's not a slider to indicate that it's getting wider, so people just don't realize it's happening? Yeah. No, I'm not even joking. Okay.

It nailed it. It's actually an interesting thing. For example, if you take a picture in pixel and then you can go kind of watch it process for a second or two, if you manage to catch it while it's processing, you can see it turned from this kind of noisy jumble into this really sweet high-res, low-noise image, and people really like that pop.

They like to look at it. They like to watch the software, make it do its magic and make it better. So people really do like to see, you know, the magic of what they're getting. The other wide-angle thing, obviously, is why isn't there a wide angle on the back? So that's another interesting one.

And so we sat back and we kind of asked ourselves, if you're a photographer and you had a 27-millimeter equivalent camera, which is basically this, you know, everyone in the market, their default camera is about 27 millimeters. What would they ask for next? And they basically would ask for maybe a 50 or an 85. And once they'd covered 50 and 85, maybe then they go to ask for something wider or maybe something super long, like a 400. I've shot with 400s and I always wanted more, like I wanted 600. So when we released Super Res Zoom on the pixel 3, which was all software, that got us to about 50.

You add the second lens on a pixel 4 and you put software on top of it, you get to about 85. So it's like having a third lens in your bag, so to speak, at optical quality. And I put that in quotes because people think optical quality means like a certain thing, and it's another very nuanced thing. But, you know, we just sat back and thought what a photographers want, and they want to walk around with a bag that has a 28, a 35, a 50, and an 85. And so that's what we built. But you're in this moment now where it seems like a lot of photographers want that ultra-wide, too. I mean, just judging from my, the replies to my tweet. Were you like, this just isn't important, it's not a thing, we don't have to do it,

or was it we're going to put our energy over here? Or was it? We max out of two on the back, because that's the rule. No, there's no particular rule. Okay. And I wouldn't say that it's not important either. Like, lots of photographers actually met, one particular photographer on our team, like, loves wide-angle capture.

that's his thing. He likes to shoot with a 20 millimeter, which is pretty wide. But when you look at it and you say, if you already have a 27, what do you want next? What's the next things on your list? Going wider than 27 is usually not very common.

I'm just going to send you the tweet. Robbie, the next one. Tons of people, actually. iPad app. iPad app. Question. That's very... That I get more than probably almost anything.

That's a big one. Yeah. Not right now. Really? We're going to keep prioritizing and thinking about what's going to be the most bang for the buck. Right now, there's a lot of things in core Instagram that we're trying to really build to get right. We've built a lot of new things into the camera, a lot of new experiences we want to follow through with. We just launched a new product threads around messaging.

It's camera first. Those are the areas we're focused on right now. Does Mark Zuckerberg have an iPad? I find a lot of iPad apps are built because CEOs are like, I don't need a laptop. I'm just like going to do Outlook and get through my day. I mean, this is my theory of iPad app development. I don't know if it's actually true. It's just what I believe.

But now there's like Catalyst, right? Like we just had Kvon from Twitter on our on the show. And he was like, yep, Catalyst means we can build a Mac app. We have an iPad app. We can go right here. Does that expand your market? Does that change your thinking at all? I think it's something that makes it a little easier.

Like we're definitely going to look at it probably a little bit more over time. I think just when you look at the core use case of like why use interim every day. It's like you got this few seconds. You're in between where you're moving and you open up your phone. It's very mobile oriented. Everything from the expectation of resolution, crop, how the whole thing is considered.

It's mobile first. And it's really a communication oriented product. So, yes, I think it would be pretty rad to have like a big visual experience you could just kind of go through. But it's secondary right now. But we'll keep thinking about it, particularly as the tools get better over time.

It makes it easier. And we'll keep revisiting the question. Right. So you hear about the iPad app all the time. and you're like, yep, it's not worth it. Yeah. Because, I mean, there's so many, I mean, there's a lot of users on the core product and the things that they need just out of Instagram every day.

If I could also show you the things in my inbox and DM and the reports from Instagram, you'd be like, wow, yeah, go fix us. I would love to see that, Ashley. That would be great. Ashley, do you want to ask this question? I've got a long Ashley list here. Oh, wow, this is still about DMs. Yeah, I mean, I know.

Give me some more DM feedback. You love DM. I'm into the DM. You don't, all right. DMs on the desktop. I hear this a lot because you have the web app. Great. Stories are on there, which is awesome.

Why no DMs? Yeah, I mean, these are the types of things that are hard. When you know there's tools, they're going to be useful for people. And I wish we could make them because some people would probably enjoy them. But then when we look at the actual web usage, just in general, cross-in-in-gram traffic on Dub-Dub versus the mobile app, it just never really makes it worth a trade-off of time because of the relatively small. amount of people that we think will probably use it.

All right, I got one more for you. Go. Why are no front cameras stabilized? Oh, that is actually a great question. That's a fabulous question. Nailed it. That's the first. Someone from Twitter asked that question.

I'm going to reach into what hardware knowledge I have and say that when you are building a camera, I should say when you're building a phone, you have all these different constraints to deal with. And every little bit you add to the camera basically makes it larger. And you'd be surprised, actually. So if you want to make the camera wider, for example, you have to also make it taller just because of how light bends. That's just a reality of the situation. You can't only make it, you know, wider in one dimension. The OIS modules, they actually, it's crazy, you actually build a module around the module. You hang the inner module on springs, and then you put these little magnets on each side of it and use the magnets

to like align it, the module within the module. And it's really hard to do OIS in the front, OIS in the back, multiple cameras, the whole front facing kind of unlock feature, plus a speaker, plus a thin bezel, plus a radar chip, which is in Pixel 4, and have that OIS in the front, and have it all kind of fit in the package. So you're right. If you took like a huge sensor and put it on the front and had OIS and all the things

just like you did on the back, you'd probably get better pictures on the front. But in this hell game of prioritization and how things have to get slotted into the phone, it ends up being really, really hard to do something like that. Is the front camera actually more important than the rear camera?

Both, you should answer this question? In general. Yeah. That's a good question. I'd say yes. And that's just because of what you're seeing? I think that like, it's hard. I jump to yes.

But I think that when you see people and the emotion and yourself, like I've a 15-month-old daughter and the amount of times that I just have selfies with her because I'm just by myself, probably the most valuable things on my phone versus I'm trying to think of the things I take with my back-facing camera. And I feel like they're less human, they're less about the people in my life. And I'd probably be willing to get rid of them more easily than the things that I've taken on my front-facing. But that's just my personal kind of take. Yeah, you're stuck. No, I'm not stuck.

I actually do think the rear is more important. Okay. And one of the big reasons why is when people turn their phone to me and they swipe through their pictures, maybe this is just the people I hang out with. But they don't show me selfies. They show me pictures of their kids, right? Hanging out trick-or-treating because it's Halloween today, right? Kids trick-or-treating.

It's rear-fishing cameras. By the way, we both did that today. I did that right before I came here. I was trick-or-treating with my daughter. It's just a more flexible camera. You can do more with it. If you only have one, a front or a rear, I think you'd choose rear. I don't know.

I think that's tough. I mean, I'm still the person who carries around like four cameras. So like, it's like which of my babies do I have to give away? Yeah, I think you're right. But I would pick it because it is the best camera. But if I had to pick it like, where is the best camera pointing? I would almost certainly want it. If you get the back facing quality face the other way.

Yeah. Have you seen that wild Asuse phone that the motor is over? It's great. It's great. It's like, what is the best thing about Android? It is that people get to make insane hardware and like ship it. And like Assis was like, what if this thing rotated around? And that to me

is like, okay, well this is definitely going to break. This is right not a good idea, but like I'm super into it because I get to take the highest quality photo this way. And I think that it's actually a, I think that conversation is going to change over time. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner,

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Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to baby. set a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right. I want to make sure you get questions from the audience.

We've got a microphone over there. Raise your hand. We'll get it to you. Here we go. Thank you for that kind introduction, Eli. Today's segment, like every week, is called Flip Phones. And there are three O's in phones. We have so much exciting news because we have two flip phones now. So Motorola, we knew this was coming. Motorola is working on a flip phone, on a razor.

And that's supposed to be announced next month. And we've got leaked photos of the razor. But wait, there's also another flip phone because Samsung, because it just is so good at folding phones. Now it wants to use all of its magical technology for flip phones. But here's the Samsung twist. We don't know hardly anything about any of these phones. And the Samsung one is a render.

At least Motorola's looks like leaked photos of a possibly real device. Samsung's is obviously conceptual. But Samsung's concept is that the phone has like a, like, okay, you flip the phone open, right? That's flat, right? And then there's closed, like it's a clamshell, right? But halfway where it's like an L shape and now the phone is kind of like its own tripod. So, you know, is that cool? Is that great?

Why do I want both of these phones so much? There is a little worry. It's really hard to tell because, again, grading, leaked photos. We haven't seen a lot of it. But the Motorola phone might be a little bit bigger than a razor, like the classic Razor V3 that we're all desperate for in a smartphone reimagining. So anyways, you know, obviously I do this segment every week.

we'll have a lot more news as it breaks on flip phones, but this was a doozy. Yeah, so this question is for Robbie. Just anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people on, like, my Instagram feed use a lot less filters. So I'm just kind of wondering, like, this was like a really original feature of Instagram. How does that affect, like, the product as it's being developed that, like, this original feature is essentially something that people don't want to use anymore. Yeah. I think filter usage is going down for sure. And people used to have, these really heavily stylized, bordered photos. Interestingly, it is coming back a little bit, particularly younger folks that are using these very vintage style, like, old film kind of thing.

So I wouldn't go as far to say that people aren't using it. I think it's just evolving. But I do agree that it's definitely not the everyday use case anymore where you have this very stylized photo. And how it affects product is we try not to make that a really key aspect of something that we expect everyone to use. So for instance, on story, cameras, you have to swipe into some filters. It's not even the default setting and they're actually not very discoverable in a lot of ways. And I think on feed, we've made it a little easier for people to swipe to tune those down a little bit. And we also usually revisit the tuning of them over time as well. Wait, you can turn down the filter in the stories? Yes, the intensity of it.

If you tap on the filter, it'll have a little slider and you can turn it down on a percentile basis. Wait, and it's not the greater in the stories? In the grid. Sorry, I thought there was yet more hidden UI in stories. Non-stories. Which is another list of questions I have over here. All right. We had somebody over here. Thanks for doing this, by the way.

I'm curious about how do you guys think about not just the photos that you're taking right now and the trends that are happening now, but in the future when people look back through their feeds and back through their photos. What are the feelings or experiences that you want to have when people do that? Because, like, looking at my Instagram from, like, five years ago, it's cluttered with, like, these crazy filtered, you know, like, super desaturated photos. And I wonder if, like, you build products around that. Sure. I mean, we, you know, I'm not a product manager for the Google Photos team. So I can't really, I can't really speak for them. But, you know, we like to call it reminiscing.

So I think you're talking about, like, having this style that you had five years ago that you no longer have, which is like, okay, the jeans went out of fashion. And that's a whole other issue. But for us on Pixel, we're more about capturing the right moment in time. So it's the right smile, the right look, the right gaze between two people in a photo that rakes it a really meaningful moment. And that's one reason, like, there are no filters in the Pixel Camera app. They don't exist. You can't use one in the Pixel Camera app. It's just about the memory.

It's just about the moment. So luckily, that's not like an issue that we have to deal with of styles coming in and out over time. I think for me, we have an archive feature for stories and for feed. So you can always put them in an archive or you can just reminisce and keep scrolling too, if you're not someone who uses archive. But I think for me, the main thing I'd want is to make it easier for you to relive happiness in your life. Because really the right of the reason people share on Instagram is these happy moments and things that they have that they want to connect over. And so I think if we actually could do a better job, if we had infinite resources, it would be awesome in archive,

differentiating between my like ugly selfie happy photo of like the Nationals Win the World Series and a moment I do actually want to maybe see or maybe I would want to see that one again but probably not that version maybe the nicer one if you're really nice to separate those and say okay these are the things I really want to relive these were just funny stupid things I put on Instagram I probably don't need to see again and be able to bubble those up in the right way and probably reconnect with the people that were a part of that as well because I do think there's an aspect of just kind of reliving experiences and nostalgia that just give people joy and it's just a really important thing. And I wish we could do more there.

Hey, I have two questions, both of them are Instagram related, so I apologize. But the first one is long term, hopefully, I guess. And then the second is shorter term. So like, it's Armageddon. There's a giant meteor headed for the Bay Area. Wow. What is the game plan? Yes. You know, Vine died and I lost all of my. my vines and I'm so sad. You are people. What is the plan for my Instagram grid photos? Number one, am I going to download them?

Number two is the Instagram cosmetic surgery effect ban. How's that working? How's that thought process going? And I mean, people are uploading those things every day now. Like user-generated. Kylie and all of her crew are using that holy bucks thing now, which is clearly like a snatch nose, lip injections.

How is that existing? what's up? Okay, cool. Good questions. I'll take the last one first. So people who don't know, the Instagram camera opened up a series of effects for partners to be able to build feature effects into the camera itself. This happened around August. And a few of the effects that popped up that we didn't realize we're going to pop up

actually were plastic surgery-oriented effects that had markings and things that we think promoted plastic surgery. Absolutely not intended or something that we support on the Instagram platform. well-being and people's well-being is our absolute top priority. If we don't have that, we have nothing. So we've removed those. They're not complying with our current standards. And we're still looking at how to make sure our policies and make sure that things like that don't exist in the future too, because that's important. And it's a process that we're working through. So that's the first answer. But those types of filters are not supported by Instagram and we're removing them.

On the other filter or the other question about Armageddon, I think, is it more of a data a backup question. Like, how do you get your stuff out? Okay, so like when Vine died, we had like, I don't remember how much time they gave us, but they were like, hey, Vine's collapsing. If you want to download your videos for like archival purposes, here's your link. If you don't do it within X amount of time, your videos are dead to the world and you can ever access them again. So it's Armageddon. Instagram is dying. All of our, I've had an Instagram since like 2010 or whatever 11. What's going to happen all my photos? Am I going to have an option to download them are they just gone.

The way we would approach this is you own it. Is there a plan in place, but these are your content. There's not a plan for the media plan. I mean, maybe think about it. You're raising good questions. We work for you. Like, they're your photos. You should be able to have them. It should be easy for you to get them and keep them safe. Do you think about data portability

in that way though? Like should you build that now for data portability reasons? Yeah, like, we just do that right now. I think that is probably something. I think that is something. I mean, like, right now. This started out so great. And we're like, what's a photo? Now it's like, let me download my You can download your photos. Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that we're going to look at.

I think part of portability and just in general, just good hygiene should be something we support over time. I think it would just be just a question of exactly when we could get it done. But it's something I'd like to see. For the filters question, like, where is the line with that? Because it might not be explicitly a plastic surgery filter, but something that makes your face thinner and, like, teens who are growing up literally only seeing filtered faces. how are you and you guys care a lot about bullying and all that like how are you thinking about mental health going forward and where the line is and what filters are allowed on the platform yeah it's a great question historically like when we've built filters for ourselves we did not have filters that altered or like change the size and shape of your face and like that was important and I think as we're developing and having more and more of these filters occur having a whole partner ecosystem we got to take a hard look at this like I think it's going to be a really important set of questions about how people view themselves and questions of and self-confidence. And it's a very tough line. Because on one side, we hear from users all the time. Wow, I felt really self-conscious about how I looked. I put this cute thing on, and it made me

happy, and I put it on Instagram, and then people said I looked amazing, and it made me feel great. And I got to connect with three people that I haven't talked to you. And we're like, oh, that's awesome. And the other side, you hear stories like what you're mentioning. And so I think it's just finding that balance is to be something that we have to continue to do. And so we've been looking at both policy and also the types of effects that we're seeing. And also working line on ranking. So when you look at the effects gallery, it's really important to the things that we actually are discoverable and are ranked are things that we think really match the use cases of like sharing what you love, feeling good, being goofy, and those types of things, which our camera

really is for, and not for things that really the camera is, we don't think the camera should be for. So I actually want to ask that question, Isaac, too, because there are other cameras from other phones that sort of automatically beautify you. That's a thing we see all the time. Do you guys have that conversation when it's like there's a line of okay well noise reduction sort of just smooths your skin so if it's so light you're just like it's happening to you great accident versus we actually need

a beautification mode to go compete and so the markets where that stuff is the standard so we do actually have a we call it face retouching not beatification I'll tell you one in a second but we do have a face retouching feature that's actually on by default but it has a toggle and if you turn it off it's off

like straight there's no there's no games it's off off The reason we call it retouching is we don't think of it as beautification. There are lots of apps that will let you make your face thinner, make your lips bigger, your nose smaller or larger, like whatever you want to do to your face, it'll make your face look like that. We don't do any of that. So there are certain lines that we won't cross.

So what you're getting at? Absolutely, yes. When we sat down and made face retouching, we thought, well, first we went and talked to a bunch of wedding photographers because that's like your most important moment on your most important day where you have to look good but you because you're going to be looking at it for the rest of your life. And we asked them,

what do you do for people on their wedding day? When they've already put in all the effort to make themselves look amazing, which lots of people do every morning, and we tried to emulate what they were doing. And so that's something we're willing to turn on by default. What are those specific things that you do? So the big one is skin smoothing.

That's like the most important thing. But there are nuances to how you do skin smoothing because they're like these, we call them frequency domains, but it's basically there are very, very small features on your face, like pores, and that's like very high frequency. And then there's stuff like splotches. Like if I had sat here for this whole interview like this, I'd have this giant red splotch on my face.

And the pores are part of you, but the splotch is not. So we try to be kind of intelligent at how we correct, not correct, but like, we take away the parts what you look like today that isn't you. It's like whatever happened to you today we try to take that away and make you look like you just walked out of the bathroom in the morning and looked really great. So we have actually

lots and lots of thinking and I'm thinking of multiple documents and slide decks that we've created thinking about where that line is and why it should exist that way and we worry about a lot of the same problems that Robbie does on Instagram. That's fascinating. Yeah.

My wedding photographer retouched that all of our photos. and like that's like partially the nightmare right is like some people have a very heavy hand were you thinking about them actually retouching the photos or what you look like on the wedding day sorry what do you say it's like our i don't mean our wedding photographer is great everybody hire him um they're really fun can you imagine the nightmare of being my wedding photographer and i was like what camera you're using um they were very patient with us but like they retouched the photos afterwards are you thinking about that process the photoshop process or

you got made up and you're beautiful in the morning. Oh, we're thinking about the Photoshop process. So we don't change the shape of your face. We don't change the color of your face. We don't give you lipstick. It's about kind of raising the shadows. It's kind of raising exposure. So you look a little, you have that.

There's this wonderful thing that we call the glow. Call the highlighter. Huh? Highlighter. Women have figured this out. We try to do the glow. glow without that. But we try to capture the glow, which has a lot to do with exposure and tone mapping and a little bit of a little bit of skin smoothing. And it ends up making people

look like how they see themselves. Because when you look in the mirror, you know, some people have those crazy curved mirrors for doing makeup, right? And you can actually, that's like intentional so you can see the pores. But most people, you stand five feet away from a mirror, look at yourself in the morning, you go, I look good. Wow. I am so fascinated by your focus. This is great. We'll replicate that feeling. Okay. We're way over time, but I wanted to end

in this question because we started with the big existential question about what's a photo. What actually happens next with cameras and photo? What's the thing that we're on the cusp of that hasn't happened yet, but you can see is potentially another paradigm change? Like computational photography was a paradigm change.

Like sharing with a mass audience, like Instagram as a paradigm change. What's the thing that you see coming? Isaac, we'll start with you. That's a large question. Yeah, you got like four seconds. Oh, man. I actually think that there's a lot of quality left.

And I mean quality in like a very, if you zoom out the picture and you look at the whole thing on a, you know, on a little phone screen that's realistically not going to get much larger than your hand ever. There's a lot of stuff that we can do like on a subjective side. You don't have to pixel peep to go find it. There's a whole lot left to do there with color, dynamic range, all the tone mapping stuff that we do in HDR Plus

to make scenes look more like you remember them and not like a camera took them. Robbie. The last point he made took my point, which was, I mean, I'm really surprised still, actually, just based on how quality the technology is and how much time and effort goes into this. There is still a diff when you take a photo

and you're like, I don't remember that looking that way at all. Either it's the lighting or low lighting environment or it's people's faces when you actually look at someone's face and you just look at the photo and it really doesn't look like the person necessarily. And I do think the more we can converge those and potentially if you introduce other types

of more immersive capture formats, potentially like in the ARVR space, you really get a really relived potential experience which I think would be really exciting for people. That's great. Well, thank you both so much for doing this. Thank you all for coming. I got to say this is like, why does the verge exist for this extremely nerdy conversation with cameras?

So thank you for indulging us on our birth. This is actually brilliant. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul.