Instagram quietly removes option to post to your Photomap, killing stalkers’ dreams

It appears that Instagram has quietly removed its “Add to Photomap” option with its most recent update.

While you can still tag images with a location, they won’t be fed onto the map anymore. You can also finally tag images with locations other than where you are posting from, on iOS anyway.

I recently wrote about the dangers of having the feature turned on after well-known British Formula One driver Jenson Button and his wife Jessica Michibata had their holiday home broken into and a very pricey engagement ring stolen, not long after a photo of the ring had been posted on Instagram.

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Michibata has since removed all images from her map.

While it will surely irk some users, it does seem to be a wise move on the company’s part, after such a high profile incident being potentially linked.

A lot of people aren’t aware that they have photos on their map, so it is basically a stalkers dream at the moment.

Photos can be manually removed by going into the map section on your profile, choosing edit and removing the images you don’t want to be locatable on the map.

Instagram’s Photomap help page says that images tagged with a location will automatically be added to your map, however that is not the case. Having tested the theory twice, once with an image from my current location and once tagging an image at a different location, it did not add either image to my map.

I expect that since the option is now gone, the map could possibly be removed entirely in the future or replaced with something new.

Update:

A spokesperson for Instagram said: “On Monday we made a change to make it easier for people to add location to their photos. As part of this, we removed the option to “add to Photomap” from the flow”.

Instagram claims that when a photo is tagged with a location now, it should add itself automatically to the map, but as I stated already, I have tried that method as well numerous times now and it hasn’t worked. The spokesperson for the company has said the issue will be investigated.