Instagram 'grid' of pictures might be changed to include far more photos

The change could ruin carefully curate profiles

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a press event at Facebook headquarters on June 20, 2013 in Menlo Park, California (Getty Images)

Something very strange is happening to Instagram's grid of pictures.

A number of people are reporting that their profiles have expanded into a grid of photos that goes four images across, not three across like normal. That means that each of the images is a little smaller, and changes how the profiles appear.

Expanding might seem minor, or even positive. But for a range of people – who keep their Instagram neatly organised, arranging everything into sets of three so that it appears properly on the site – any such change could ruin all their hard work.

Many big Instagram accounts and those for companies are arranged so that a photo is actually spread over a number of posts, for instance, or so that the colours change as a person scrolls down. There are even special tools made specifically for helping make such pages.

The change could be the result of a glitch that is leading the profiles to display wrongly. But it is happening to a lot of people, apparently at random, and what's more the site has tested out new features in this scattershot way before.

Earlier this year, it gave some people access to slideshows that kept a number of photos in one post, for instance. And it did the same with the Favorites feature, which still hasn't been rolled out to everyone on the site.