Industry News


Instagram Finally Adds Option to Turn Off Embed Tool

December 17, 2021

By Hillary K. Grigonis

© Instagram

The question of whether embedding an Instagram photo of a copyrighted work constitutes infringement has been at the center of several intellectual property lawsuits for the last couple of years. At the request of several photography-focused organizations, Instagram is now rolling out the option to turn off its embed tool, allowing users to prevent others from embedding their posts onto another web page. The option rolled out in the U.S. today; a global rollout is expected sometime in 2022.

Embedding a photo or video is a way to get a post from Instagram to appear on a third-party website. The image remains hosted on the original platform, but viewable on that third-party website. In theory, that can help users get more views, but the Instagram embed tool has also created confusion on whether or not embedding the image is fair use. Instagram’s terms of use permits the platform to sublicense images to a third party, yet earlier this year, Instagram’s parent company admitted that it doesn’t have any sub-licensing agreements in place.

[Read: How to Protect Your Images on Social Media]

Thanks in part to the efforts of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPPA), Instagram has finally given users the say in the matter, adding settings that allow them to turn off embeds. Now other users will no longer see a button to grab the embed code on a post’s submenu.

Instagram says that turning off embeds will remove existing embeds from other webpages; however, the company says that it may take time for that embed link to no longer be visible. (As before, private Instagram accounts do not have the embed option.)

[Read: I Deleted All My Social Media—Here’s Why My Photos and Business Are Better Off]

The NPPA said that it has been working with Instagram on the issue for more than a year and a half. “NPPA believes this change is extremely important given all the lawsuits regarding embedding,” said NPPA General Counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher in a released statement. “We hope photographers will take advantage of this feature. We also expect that publications will cease trying to circumvent copyright protections by claiming they have a right to embed images and properly license images from the photographers who often risk their health and safety to make them.”

Earlier this year, ASMP sent a letter to Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg exploring the issue and asking the company to give users the option of whether or not to allow embeds. Because users only had the option to prevent embeds with a private account, the organization said that “this puts the photographers in the difficult position of choosing whether to make their account private and rejecting the functionality of a business account or allowing their work to be widely used without permission via a public profile.”

The ASMP sent the letter after a case where the publication Mashable embedded an Instagram photo after the photographer, Stephanie Sinclair, declined the publication’s $50 licensing offer. Sinclair’s case was originally thrown out because the judge agreed that Instagram’s terms of use allowed the sublicense. However, after Facebook responded to a similar case with a statement that it does not grant a sub-license for the embed tool, Sinclair’s case was reconsidered. In February of 2021, Mashable and Sinclair reached a settlement in favor of the photographer. Sinclair’s case was not the only one addressing copyright confusion around the tool—a San Francisco suit filed this summer aimed to force Instagram to prevent copyright infringement with the embed tool.

Now, photographers can turn off the embed tool entirely. To turn off embeds on Instagram’s mobile app, users need to navigate to their profile, then the menu, then the settings. Under the “account” options, users can tap the toggle next to the “allow people to embed your posts or profile on other websites.” From a computer or mobile browser, the same setting is found in the Privacy and Security tab of the Settings.

[Read: Photogs’ Lawsuit Hopes to Change Instagram’s Embed Tool Algorithms]

“We commend Instagram on their inclusion of this feature,” the AMP said in a statement, “and are proud of ASMP’s advocacy work for more than nine months on achieving this result from one of the largest social media platforms in the world.”

For more information, visit ASMP for a step-by-step on disabling embedding on your Instagram account via Android, iPhone or through a Browser on your computer. You can also view Instagram’s tutorial on turning off embeds here.