At Long Last, Instagram Users are Free to Reorganize Their Grids

As with all things in life, the best way to use and enjoy a social media platform is to make peace with the inevitability of it changing, usually for the worse. Whether you outgrow the internet humor of the early 2010s and eventually drift away from Reddit or find your favorite platform purchased by a fascist billionaire and overrun by Nazis and bots, you can and should not let that shift in platform or self diminish the quality time that was had in the halcyon days. Conversely, pining for a return to that era is an equally foolish (and often reactionary) impulse.

All one really can do is acknowledge that a top-down change has been made by soulless algorithms and their somehow-even-more-soulless creators in SF, and decide whether or not a platform’s dopamine juice shot is still worth the squeeze.

Though Instagram is still the second (or third) biggest social media platform in terms of user base behind Meta sister-site Facebook (and WhatsApp if you’re the type of freak who counts that as social media), the app’s been in a state of precarity for a number of years. Users post fewer photos these days, which prompted a 2025 UI redesign that prioritized Reels and DMs, the two features that drove the bulk of the company’s growth in recent years. More recently, their overreliance on unsecure AI chatbots resulted in hackers being able to hijack over 20,000 accounts with prompts requesting password changes.

It’s these particular news bites that make yesterday’s post from Instagram’s head honcho, Adam Mosseri, all the more curious. IG’s pivot to a focus on Reels last January turned everyone’s grid of three columns of stacked squares into three columns of stacked rectangles in one update. For many, the change was aesthetically unpleasing and irksome, but not the worst thing they’d been forced to endure. But for many of Instagram’s more design-fixated creators—many of whom had spent countless hours meticulously organizing their grid posts into a cohesive macro image—the image-altering format change crossed a line. With a caption that only said “Finally,” Mosseri’s post announced to users that a remedy for this issue teased all the way back in January was finally live: users can now rearrange the posts on their grid.

No longer shackled to chronological order, those wishing to shuffle things up can long-press whichever grid post they want to move, then tap “reorder grid” in the menu options, and move it to its new position. Don’t forget to save those changes once the layout is more to your liking.

Though there have been requests for this feature since the grid was still all squares and shuffling the tiles around doesn’t really negate the crop carnage done by the forced aspect ratio re-standardization, a win’s a win, right? Soon enough, we’ll likely look back on the days when we were limited to pinning three posts to the top of our profile as quaintly primitive, just as we today regard the app’s early years, when over-saturation and garish filters were applied with reckless abandon.