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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge family of websites. Dot situation. Dot situ- is there a dot situation? I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Hello, hello.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Ashley Carmen is here. Hello. And this is actually a really special episode of The Vergecast. We're live at Mozzola's Glass Room in San Francisco. We've got a crowd. The crowd is here.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  And we have two very special guests. We have Isaac Reynolds from Google. Hello. And Robby Stein from Instagram.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Good one.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  And the Verge-

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Also, it's my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  That's sweet. Well, I can't say the mean thing.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  But the Verge also turns eight on November 1. So it's gonna just be, everyone's in a great mood. We're gonna 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.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Sure. So I support the consumer product team, focused 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.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  And Isaac, you're the Product Manager of the Pixel Camera.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Right. So I'm the Lead Product Manager on the Pixel Camera, focused on software. So I help the team put together a roadmap for the coming years of what we're gonna do in computational photography and try to change how people think about taking photos and taking videos and things like that.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  So having the two of you together on a stage to have this conversation is particularly interesting to me. I'm very excited about it. Where, 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 Verge-er thing. Like, that's the project I think we started the entire site. It's our birthday, I'm being very...

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Happy birthday.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  But that's like why, it'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, it's a little philosophical. It is extremely Dieter Bohn in its way. But the very nature of what a photo is, has changed. And it's changed both in how you are creating them with computational photography. We're no longer capturing one instant in time. We're capturing like several slices. And then he's just smiling at me. He's like, "It's a photo."

• 4:01Speaker 05

  It's nuanced.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  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 Isaac, I'll start with you. What is a photo? Do you take photos? Do you make them?

• 4:18Speaker 05

  I never take photos.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  Actually, I was gonna say, if I had to boil it down to just a couple of words, I would probably say that a photo is a memory, more than anything else.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Aww.

• 4:28Speaker 05

  So we focus it on...

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  It's very nice! I thought that's not a sarcastic "aw". I really do like that.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  I was serious. It's about reminiscing and remembering, and capturing moments forever that maybe you couldn't capture before. So, night sight, for examples, 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.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  That is very, extremely depressing to exist in.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  But now with Pixel.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  Alright Robbie, what's a photo?

• 5:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think of, well, I think when most people think of a photo, they're like, "I 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?

• 5:51Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't think so. And the, the reason is because, at the end of the day, we, 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 call it 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, you know, cleaner, sharper, look nicer.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Enhancing reality. Improving reality. You see where it gets fuzzy?

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Uh, it could get fuzzy. Yeah. Uh, I'll give you a 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? Like, is the, 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 this huge amount of computation and nuance that goes into the image that you get. And it's a, it's definitely a fine line that we try to walk.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  Is there, is there a far boundary that you won't cross?

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, for example, I know that I'm very handsome. My camera seems awfully confused about how handsome I am.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, there are certainly lines that we won't cross. Uh, we at, 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.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  But how do you balance people's need to look good in their selfies? Like, I wanna look good.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  You do look good, right?

• 7:30Speaker 06

  And if I'm gonna share it to Instagram, like, and Instagram is willing to make me look better, how do you kind of think about?

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Well, this, 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 gonna see it next. Um, so we focus on low light, detail, dynamic range, color accuracy, uh, and giving you the most flexible thing you can work with later on.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  So Robbie, is that, is that how you think of it too? Because you, on the other hand, it's, the first thing you do in Instagram is edit. Right, you're, you, you, the assumption, I think, that you probably have is that people are gonna start modifying the image. So, do you have a far line, or is there like, we just know it's gonna happen?

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think for us, we wanna, like, the point of the Instagram camera is to share and communicate what you're doing, what 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 Superzoom, 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

• 9:02Speaker 04

  kind of how you look.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 9:18Speaker 04

  No, I think we do care about what it looks like because 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," or "I was with you when you were really angry when your sports team lost the World Series." Mine actually won, so I was very happy.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  You just worked that right in there.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  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?

• 9:59Speaker 04

  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."

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  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 tests. I can always tell which one is a Pixel. It's contrasty, it has really neutral colors, it's great. You did good, good, I like your camera. We're done here, that's it.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  But it's a very clear look. And we were talking to Marc Lavoie at the recent hardware event. He said, "We know we have a look. This year, we changed 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."

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Which happened, by the way.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  That's some really answer I'm hoping for here. It's like a long digression on Annie Leibowitz yelling at the Pixel team. But like, what are the inputs for you? Because you're only changing it year to year. Whereas I see on Instagram, it's like, week to week.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  Well, users is the big input. That's why I like to come to 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 tastemaker. 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 look. So, we take our 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 and detail. And part of that is the subjective look that you're talking about. We call it the signature look. I think Marc 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.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  It happens to look really good for landscapes, in particular, and sunsets. But when we 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 in other 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 photo is this beautiful sunset and half the photo is a portrait.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  The Pixel 2 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 are 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 2 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 is most photos now are this much flatter?

• 13:18Speaker 05

  I think it was more, "This is cool."

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you were like, "Eric, I'm on the winning team."

• 13:24Speaker 05

  We weren't so happy about the flat look.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  So, one of the reasons HDR Plus, that signature look, is so moody is because we didn't want that flat look.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  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, like, software is now becoming a much bigger part of image processing. We're glad to be a part of it, we're glad to have helped kick it off, but not that flat look. We're not a fan of that.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna put freckles on your face even though you don't have freckles, like, let's just get it done"?

• 14:11Speaker 04

  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 swipe-over 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 of 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.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  And we're starting to see that actually the formats are also as distinctive as any other color as well. It's like 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. But we think it's important to keep that consistency long-term so that people have an expectation that it's still there.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  How do you think about the cadence of creating those effects and even the camera releases? 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.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  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, it would, 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

• 16:14Speaker 04

  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. 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 underlying camera technology.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  I feel like Super Zoom came about, though, originally from users doing the like quick finger up zoom, like who's...

• 16:39Speaker 06

  Who do you think is the stronger tastemaker on Instagram? Like, 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?

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Users are really, are really, really critical to what we build. And I think we did notice that people would zoom in very quickly. But that, the, the specific example of super zoom was probably because it has more humor associated with it, it was probably just more, less about that zooming motion, but more that people wanted to do something, express that there's something that's funny. And then the other one was we just saw that people were adding all of these hearts and heart 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 super zoom, hearts, experiences, and heart eyes, and a bunch of the other AR filters that we added.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Am I allowed to comment as well? My dream is that YouTube just talk to each other.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  And we just sit back.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Go ahead. Yeah. No, I was gonna say, you talk about people zooming in when they're taking Instagram videos, and they're zooming really fast, you zoom in a little bit, come back a little, you know, the Instagram, not the Instagram, but the dramatic chipmunk, chipmunk look. You know, people use the pixel default camera very differently from that. From us, when you pinch zoom in, 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, it's, it's in bits now, it can't be changed. So we see that as like this horrible mistake.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  But it's funny.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  So this gets, I mean, this is like the heart of it. Like, 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 hawk your products. Yeah. No, I have a lot of perfect Instagram presence. But like, that's, the Instagram grid in particular is where you want your best stuff. Do you see people using your camera for that? Or are they using the create mode for stories?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  They do both, but I think our cameras use more for stories because our toolset 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 producers, you're like, "I want to put something on my stories." I like never want to see that thing again. Like, I not only don't want to remember it, I like am 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 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 the 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.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  But do you find that people go back to the archive?

• 19:36Speaker 04

  They do. And I think because-

• 19:38Speaker 06

  I look at my stories.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's a very personal question.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Well, the thing is, there's a lot of diversity in the use 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 it, you're just putting them on there. But for Fita, I agree, like, that one is much more about highlights and about this kind of sense of this memory and memorialization of like 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, like, those are things that are really important to me. And they're two different jobs that live in one product for us.

• 20:21Speaker 06

  We have to ask.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Sure, I mean, Ashley comes, Ashley's been waiting to ask this question all day.

• 20:26Speaker 06

  Did stories destroy the grid? Is anyone still using the grid? Okay, you use the grid. Maybe at least two users. One extraordinarily important user of the grid.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Yes, people love the grid. They really do. People, people love the profile and the grid. I think for a lot of people, it is the main way, their main representation of themself on the internet. Like, it really is. And if you've never met me before, or we 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, and they really enjoy it.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  But do you see in the, in the, sort of, your daily usage numbers, the shift towards stories?

• 21:05Speaker 04

  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 be like, whoa, 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. Um, and so we do see a lot, a lot of casual usage on stories.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you, so when you open the, it's create mode? When you slide, slide over to-

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Just camera.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  Camera? So that's the video camera. Do you think, oh, we gotta, 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?

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Well, it gets back to the jobs. You know, what, why is someone hiring the Instagram camera? And if it's ultimately to communicate-

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I stop you? Do you all know Silicon Valley product manager speak? That's how they all talk.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I'll explain the job thing.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Every single one of you is hiring a software product every day. Um, there's no HR department, you can fire the software product at will. You don't have to pay severance.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  But preferably not Instagram products.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, keep going.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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.

• 22:50Speaker 06

  Are most people using effects on their stories?

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  I'm getting the sense that reality is really boring for you guys.

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, again, this is a split, right? I mean, here we're like, we're gonna enhance reality.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  It's not boring. It's just that 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? And you put a little gif thing in there that's fun and that explains like how excited you are about something. It communicates more than just a regular photo. Yeah, a smile's not good enough anymore.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  So Isaac, how much are you thinking about the things that are happening to these photos in when you're thinking about how to process a photo? Because when like, there's gonna be an output, right? It's gonna get saved in Google Photos. It's gonna get sent as an MMS that is crushed and terrible and awful.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  David, would you like to talk about RCS now?

• 23:31Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't. Or like, it's gonna go to Instagram and it's gonna, you know, maybe, maybe if you're lucky, it'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?

• 23:43Speaker 05

  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. Like, I would be very happy if that were, that were the reality.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  You can make a button that makes that maybe one, one tap. Share extensions.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Feel free.

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  This is my dream.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Product.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Can we negotiate this right here, right now?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  We're gonna be, uh, just get a whiteboard and like, make a new thing. Well, yeah, 20 minutes, we'll be back. Is that cool?

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  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 that 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.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  So one of my least favorite sort of responses to how nerdy I am about photos in our reviews is it doesn't matter, it's just going on Instagram. Right? You don't have to like crop into the photos as closely as you do and be like, this, these five pixels are sharper on this photo, in 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 would prefer to always have the best photo because it's gonna... I hopefully transcend like this moment in time. And second, I'm pretty sure that you guys are going back and improving the display of photos in the archive over time. So I actually, is that true?

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  Do you, do you think about this photo from 2012, we should actually recompress it to make it better versus the input that we have? Or is that just lost to the mists?

• 25:35Speaker 04

  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, the parameters just change based on the quality of the camera, phone, bandwidth. And so if you go back to your Instagram, your old stuff, it's gonna look a little jankier.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  But that's staying static. You're not, you're not ever improving that stuff.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Not that I'm aware.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Not that I'm aware.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  You'd be surprised how many layers of software there actually are going on there. There are transcoders. So, you know, 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 low res image and turning it into a higher res 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

• 26:38Speaker 05

  some software layer running on the phone that is like completely invisible to Instagram that is magically making them better through better upscaling.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Do you think about Instagram as an output as you are planning out camera features? Are you thinking, most people are just gonna share about? What is, what are the things, what are the sort of metrics of this is happening in Instagram that influences what you guys are doing?

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Well, the biggest thing is just, we know that people are gonna be using Instagram camera. We know they're gonna be sending their photos there. So I'll give you a very concrete example. We think a lot about like aspect ratios is one big thing where we can-

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  This is so after my own heart. We're gonna have an hour on this, please.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  In Pixel 4, we actually moved the control over 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 stories aspect ratio.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  We're designing products, five minutes, you're not trying to break us up already.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  But it is very important when you take the photo to know whether it's gonna 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 fullscreen, 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 it 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 gonna look good on Instagram.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  That's really nice.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  You're welcome.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's still gonna try to start shit.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  It's for my customers, too.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  There's a... Truly, there's no more Vergecast moment than like, "We're trying to start some aspect ratio, like beef right now." Like, this room is like, "Do it." And then like, everyone else in the world is like, "What on earth are you doing?" 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 at capture, but then because it's computational photography, there's stuff 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 gonna export it to a place like Instagram?

• 29:07Speaker 05

  There is a sad transition that we have between in-camera and like, pre-capture, post-capture. 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 disk 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 like Instagram, there's a lot less flexibility, because you just have a lot less data in that file to play with.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  So you don't think that, like, Apple lets you like, change your depth of field after the fact in their portrait mode, that it lives in their app, and then once you're gone, once you're out of their beautiful prison, like, you never get to... It is beautiful, it's very nicely maintained. It's a fucking prison.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  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 I keep... That makes me think of file formats. It's like, is there a new photo file format that preserves that beyond just RAW? That's like, okay, we're gonna re-compute?

• 30:08Speaker 05

  Well, 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 even taken in portrait mode, if you've got the right settings enabled. There's lots you can still do. So you can modify the bouquet. You can turn it into a color pop where it's like, the subject is color, and then everything is not only blurred in the background, but like grayscale as well. So there are definitely things you can do after the fact, and we have special file formats for all that stuff, too.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  And that... 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?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  I would love it if Instagram supported our custom file formats for depth.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  No love tonight!

• 30:54Speaker 05

  I appreciate that.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  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 this stuff of, we have to make a file format. So to go from, okay, we're gonna 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 re-compute that maybe you're gonna do differently than me. That obviously... That's a whole process. Are you interested in your camera shipping out a file that can do that?

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Like, so the editor can do even more with it than just a simple JPEG?

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so if I wanted to... If I wanted to take your HDR+ file, and I wanted to do my own computational photography?

• 31:32Speaker 05

  Ah, 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, like... Some little stabilization metadata in it as well, which is kind of interesting. It comes from the gyroscope. We've got raw outputs, 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.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  So when I talk about, you know, you get an image out of camera and then it's yours. We're actually embedding a lot more in that image than just the traditional little JPEG.

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  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 in my 64 gigabyte Pixel 4 base model. Right? Sorry. It's just what I think about. Like, how do you build an ecosystem around that additional data?

• 32:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  So, Ash and I were talking earlier that, like, Apple and Google, they're like, they have this horse race of who can have the best portrait mode, and it seems like Instagram, it's like, man... Didn't you have a fake portrait mode for a minute? Do you care about portrait mode?

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, portrait mode. 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, they use it. But, yeah.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  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 roadmap? Like, it would be great if, when the cameras 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 gonna get what we get and we're gonna do our thing?

• 33:52Speaker 04

  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 camera is to share stuff, mostly. And when you're doing stuff, it's usually poorly lit in your restaurant or in your room or wherever. 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.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  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?

• 34:39Speaker 04

  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 them yet. And so we really try to wait until we find something that really is going to help the whole community more. And that's been, we just had other priorities right now.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  But do you think that not every, like, I think the iPhone 7 is the most popular iPhone on 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 there's mass adoption? Or are you saying we need to be, this just isn't that important?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  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 of people are starting to use, but we think it will be really big in the future, we'll probably invest more there because we think it'll be really valuable and it's a good investment and over 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 are problems, we're going to focus on those first.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  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 4 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, a few good apps making use of it already. Facebook actually uses it, which is really cool. The, the news feed does. But we kind of have to lead the industry a little bit on pixel to make sure the data's available for them to even decide if it's worth doing for their customers.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna keep it and keep iterating on it because people are using it versus, well, that was a good idea, but we're gonna drop it and move on to the next thing.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  I think a lot of it comes down to a similar answer. You know, 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, we look at those things, basically.

• 37:16Speaker 07

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• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I think we've got a few minutes left and I want to make sure we get some questions. So now, I'm just gonna... I'm basically just gonna list feature demands of both of you.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  It's gonna sting.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  It's not a total surprise because I tweeted it and I know they both saw it. But let's... But like, you're still here, man. You're still on stage. The lights are on, the cameras are pointed. You have a captivated audience. Go for it. Yeah, they're waiting for it. Okay. Let's hear it. So, Isaac, number one.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  So much. We talked about Instagram being this like video platform. The Pixel is very much an excellent still camera. Why can't it shoot 4K 24 or 4K 60 video?

• 38:58Speaker 05

  4K 24 or 4K 60?

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 05

  Uh, why can't it do those things? I think the answer is that nobody needs those things. I shouldn't say nobody.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  I think-

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Don't y'all own YouTube? Because I feel like I know... I know some people who really think they need those things. They're very influential.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  It's one of the... 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 4K 60 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 gonna invest in the default mode, default capture.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  Things that 100% of people use. There are people who really want 4K 60. So, I think we've heard the feedback loud and clear.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  So I'm not going to say never, just not right now.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Is that something your current phone could support if you needed to put the resources towards it? Or is that way to hear?

• 40:22Speaker 05

  You know, it's a, 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 4K 60 resolution, right? That part works, other parts don't.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  And so we could do something like give you a 4K 60 that you can only record for a certain number of seconds before it saturates some bandwidth capacity. But right, that's not going to meet the pixel quality bar.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  So 4K 24 is the other one that everyone asked about, which is, if my math is correct, less than 4K 30. So if you do 4K 30, could you just light up 4K 24?

• 41:01Speaker 05

  Sitting here on stage, I have no particular reason why we could not do 4K 24.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm told it's mad science.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  But I believe one number is smaller than the other.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  This whole thing is just a delaying tactic to make sure that Ashley doesn't like literally.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  Ashley's list is way longer.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  But Robbie, okay, here's the number one 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 on?

• 41:33Speaker 04

  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. But 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 trade off. But we're absolutely, absolutely trying to give you the best possible compression and quality for the conditions you're in. And like, 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 over time, but it's definitely something we're working on.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that there should be like an Instagram Pro mode?

• 42:14Speaker 04

  What would you want with it?

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I, 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 on Instagram?

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Like you're willing to wait longer and like go on wifi and whatever? It's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. 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.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, Ash.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  What about your idea? Do you really want the digitally remastered profile? Was that a real thing, where your things get better over time?

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  I think everybody wants everything to get better over time for free. And it's... Unless it's Star Wars movies. Does anybody not want that to happen?

• 42:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a cool idea, too. That was pretty rad. That was cool.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, Ash.

• 42:56Speaker 06

  Oh, I mean, this is not about the camera. This is just my beef.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Go for it.

• 43:02Speaker 06

  You know, I bring this up to you every time.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  I know.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  When you're getting rid of red receipts on DMs, we need them gone.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Need them gone.

• 43:11Speaker 06

  They need to be gone.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. Thank you for the feedback. Feedback is a gift.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Am I gonna get Instagram Pro before she gets...

• 43:19Speaker 04

  No, I don't have...

• 43:20Speaker 06

  That is dark.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Maybe it comes with Instagram Pro.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is great.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  But no, it's a really good point. I mean, I think, like, it's, 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...

• 43:39Speaker 06

  Who are these people?

• 43:40Speaker 04

  I'll tell you. I'll tell you. So who want to see red receipts?

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  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 write back? Or did they write 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 stress. They read, and they didn't write back. But at least there's transparency. So I think that's...

• 44:04Speaker 06

  I don't want people to know I read their message.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  So just one-way, one-way read receipts.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  That's the thing.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  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 on the list is, "Why'd you take that away from me?" Is that, when you're think, I mean, this is an integrated product, right? So was your team involved in the decision to put what cameras where?

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I specialize in the software side, but we're very, very closely connected to hardware, for many, many reasons. But, so the group selfie cam on the Pixel 3 was loved so much that we made the only cam on the Pixel 4 a group selfie cam. So, if you look at the Pixel 3, they've got a narrow front camera and a very, very wide. And the one camera on the Pixel 4 is kinda in-between, but it's much, much closer to the wide side.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 45:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, I'm not even joking.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Nailed it.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  It's actually an interesting, it's an interesting thing. For example, if you take a picture in Pixel, and then you can go kinda watch it process for a second or two, if you manage to catch it while it's processing, you can see it turn from this kinda 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.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  The other wide-angle thing, obviously, is why isn't there a wide-angle on the back?

• 45:39Speaker 05

  So, that's another interesting one. And, so, we sat back and we kind of asked ourselves, if you had a, if you're a photographer, and you had a 27mm equivalent camera, which is basically, you know, everyone in the market, their default camera's about 27mm, 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, they, maybe then they would 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 really 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

• 46:24Speaker 05

  about 85. So, it's like having a third bag, 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, we just sat back and thought, what do photographers want? And they wanna walk around with a bag that has a 28, a 35, a 50, and an 85. Hence, that's what we built.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  But, so 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.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna put our energy over here."

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Or was it, "We max out at two on the back, because that's the rule."

• 47:05Speaker 05

  No, there's no particular rule like that. And I wouldn't say that it's not important either. Like, lots of photographers actually met... One particular photographer on our team loves wide-angle capture, that's his thing. He likes to shoot with a 20mm, 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.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna, I'm gonna send you the tweet.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  Robbie, the next one, tons of people actually, iPad app.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  iPad app. Question.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  That I get more than probably almost anything. That's a big one.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  Not right now.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 47:53Speaker 04

  We're gonna keep prioritizing and thinking about like, what's gonna 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 wanna 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.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Does Mark Zuckerberg have an iPad? I find a lot of iPad apps are built because like, CEOs are like, "I don't need a laptop." "I'm just like, gonna do Outlook and like, 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 Kayvon from Twitter 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?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  I think it's something that makes it a little easier. Like, we're definitely gonna look at it probably a little bit more over time. I think just when you look at the core use case, like, why do you use Instagram every day? It's like, you got this few seconds, you're in between like, 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's 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 revising the question.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you hear about the iPad app all the time, and you're like, "Yep, it's not worth it."

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Because I mean, there's so many, I mean, there's a lot of users on the, 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 those.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  I would love, 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.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  Oh, well, this is still about DMs.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I know.

• 49:39Speaker 06

  Clearly, I'm very oriented on DMs. I'm into the DMs.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  You don't DM, you're, alright.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  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?

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, these are, these are the types of things that are hard when you know there's tools that are going to be useful for, useful for people. And like, I wish we could make them because people, some people would probably enjoy them. But then when we look at the actual web usage, just in general, across Instagram traffic on dub dub dub versus the, the mobile app, it just never really makes it worth the trade off of time because of the relatively small amount of people that we think will probably use it.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I got one more for you.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Go.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  Why are no front cameras stabilized?

• 50:21Speaker 05

  Oh, that is actually a great question. That's a fabulous question.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  Nailed it. That's a very good question. Someone else, someone from Twitter asked that question.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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 make, 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.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  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.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  Is the front camera actually more important than the rear camera? Both. You should answer this question.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  In general?

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  That's a good question. I'd say yes.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  And that's just because of what you're seeing?

• 52:06Speaker 04

  I think that like, ah, it's hard. I jumped to yes. But I think that when you see people and the emotion and yourself, like I have 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.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're stuck.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  No, I'm not stuck. I actually do think the rear is more important.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  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-facing cameras.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  By the way, we both did that today.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  I did that right before I came here. I was trick-or-treating with my daughter.

• 53:05Speaker 05

  It's just a more flexible camera. You can do more with it. You, if you only, like, if you could only have one, a front or a rear, I think you'd choose rear.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I think that's, 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 a like, where is the best camera pointing? I would almost certainly want it.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  If you get the back-facing quality faced the other way.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Have you seen that like wild Asus phone that like the motor is over? It's great. I mean, it's great. It's like, what is the best thing about Android? It is that people get to make insane hardware, right? And like ship it. And like Asus was like, what if, what if this thing rotated around? And that to me is like, okay, well, this is definitely going to break. This is probably 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.

• 54:10Speaker 07

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• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 55:18Speaker 10

  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's just so good at folding phones. Now it wants to use all of its magical technology for flip phones. But here's the.

• 56:00Speaker 10

  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 clamshell, right? But halfway where it's like an L shape and now the phone is kind of like it's on tripod. So, you know, that's, is that cool? Is that great? Why do I want both of these phones so much? There is a little worry and it's really hard to

• 56:42Speaker 10

  tell because again, grainy, leaked photos, we haven't seen a lot of it, but the Motorola phone might be a little bit bigger than a Razr, like the classic Razr V3 that we're all desperate for in a smartphone reimagining. So anyways, you know, obviously I do the segment every week. We'll have a lot more news as it breaks on flip phones, but this was a doozy.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this question's 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?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think filter usage is going down for sure. And people used to have these like really heavily stylized bordered photos. Interestingly, it is coming back a little bit, particularly younger folks are using these like very like vintage style, like old film kind of things. 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 like 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 stories, camera, 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

• 58:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:16Speaker 10

  Wait, you can turn down the filter in the stories?

• 58:19Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:24Speaker 10

  Wait, and it's not in the grid or in the stories?

• 58:26Speaker 04

  In the grid.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, I thought there was yet more hidden UI in Stories.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Non-Stories.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Which is another list of questions I have over here. Alright, we had somebody over here.

• 58:36Speaker 11

  Thanks for doing this, by the way. I'm curious about how do you guys think about not just the photos like 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, like what are the feelings or like 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?

• 59:05Speaker 05

  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, like that's a, 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, you know, the right look, the right gaze between two people in a photo that makes 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

• 59:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  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 don't, 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, a lot 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'd be awesome in Archive, differentiating between my like ugly selfie, happy photo of like the Nationals winning the World Series, and a moment I do actually want to maybe, or maybe I would want to see that one again, but probably not that version, maybe the nicer one. It'd feel really nice to separate those and say, okay, these are the things I really want to relive. These were just funny, stupid

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:00:57Speaker 12

  Hey, I have two questions, both 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.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:01:12Speaker 12

  What is the game plan?

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:01:14Speaker 12

  You know, Vine died and I lost all of my vines and I'm so sad.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Your people.

• 1:01:19Speaker 12

  What is the plan for my Instagram grid photos? Number one, am I gonna download them? Number two is the Instagram cosmetic surgery effect ban? How's that working? Like, how's that, like, 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?

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Okay, cool, good questions.

• 1:01:50Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  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 were gonna 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, 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.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  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 backup question? Like, how do you get your stuff out?

• 1:02:47Speaker 12

  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 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 never access them again." So, it's Armageddon, Instagram is dying. All of our, I've had Instagram since like 2010 or whatever, 11. What's gonna happen to all my photos? Am I gonna have an option to download them?

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the way we'd approach this is, these are, you own it.

• 1:03:18Speaker 12

  Is there a plan in place though?

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  These are your content. There's not a plan for them to be your plan.

• 1:03:23Speaker 12

  I mean, maybe think about it.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Do you think about data portability in that way, though? Like, should you build that now for data portability? Yeah, like, we could just do that right now.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  I think that is probably something. I think that is something.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  This started out so great. We're like, what's a photo? Now it's like, let me download my photo.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Download your photos. You can download your photos. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's something that we're gonna look at. I think part of data 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.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  And 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, 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?

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great question. Historically, like, when we've built filters for ourself, we did not have filters that altered or like changed 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 gotta take a hard look at this. Like, I think it's gonna be a really important set of questions about how people view themselves and questions of beauty 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. And we're like, oh, that's awesome. On the other side, you hear stories like what you're mentioning. And so I think it's just finding that balance is something that we have to continue to do.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  And so we've been looking at both policy and also the types of effects that we're seeing. And also working a lot on ranking. So when you look at the effects gallery, it's really important, 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 is what our camera really is for and not for things that really the camera is, we don't think the camera should be for.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  So I actually wanna 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 where it's like, there's a line of, "Okay, well, noise reduction sort of just smoothes your skin, so it's a little light." You're just like, "It's happening to you. Great. Accident." Versus, "We actually need a beautification mode to go compete in some of the markets where that stuff is the standard."

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  So, we do actually have a, we call it face retouching, not beautification. I'll tell you why 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 will 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,

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  where you have to look, you know, good but you, because you're gonna 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.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  What, what, what are the specific things that you do?

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  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, you know, what, what you look like today that isn't you. It's like, whatever happened to you today, we try to take that away

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  and make you look like you just, you know, walked out of the bathroom in the morning and looked really great. So, we have actually lots and lots of thinking, and like, I'm thinking of multiple documents and slide decks that, 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.

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  That's fascinating.

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My wedding photographer retouched a lot of our photos. And like, that's like partially the nightmare, right? It's like, some people have a very heavy hand. Were you thinking about them actually retouching the photos? Or what you looked like on the wedding day?

• 1:08:12Speaker 05

  Sorry, what did you say?

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  It's like, our, I don't mean, our wedding photographer's great. Everybody hire him.

• 1:08:19Nilay Patel?

  They're really fun. Can you imagine the nightmare of being my wedding photographer? And I was like, what camera are you using?

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  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?

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  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 the exposure. So, you look a little, you have that, there's this wonderful thing that we call the glow.

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

  It's called a highlighter.

• 1:08:52Speaker 05

  Huh?

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  Highlighter.

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  Women have figured this out.

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  We try to do the 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, and you go, "I look good."

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  Wow. I am so fascinated by your focus.

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  This is great.

• 1:09:32Speaker 05

  We want to replicate that feeling.

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay. We're way over time, but I wanted to end on 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 was a paradigm change. What's the thing that you see coming? I was gonna start with you.

• 1:09:58Speaker 05

  That's a large question.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you got like four seconds.

• 1:10:01Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Robbie?

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  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 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 it's 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 AR/VR space, you really get a really relived potential experience, which I think would be really exciting for people.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Well, thank you both so much for doing this. Thank you all for coming. I gotta say, this is like-

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Why does the verge exist? For this extremely nerdy conversation about cameras. So, thank you for indulging us on our birthday. This was absolutely brilliant.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Rock and roll.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Paul.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:11:51Speaker 13

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