The Vergecast came together at The Glass Room in San Francisco this week to tackle the future of cameras, photos, filters, and Instagram’s doomsday plan. Hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn chatted with Verge senior reporter Ashley Carman; Instagram Director of Product Robby Stein; and Product Manager for Camera on the Pixel Isaac Reynolds to host a conversation on how the two companies interpret a seemingly simple device: a camera. Their views differ widely.

While Google’s trying to help create memories that’ll last forever, Instagram wants to be a vehicle of expression, even if it’s only for a fleeting feeling. These alternative missions end up determining various camera features, like filters and skin smoothing, and guide where the companies see their cameras going in the future. Listen to the full Vergecast episode below, along with the transcript. If you’re more of a video person, we have you covered there, too, with the video above.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of that episode.

Nilay Patel: Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge family of websites.

Dieter Bohn: Dot situation.

Nilay Patel: Dot situ... Is there a dot situation? I’m your friend, Nilay. Dieter Bohn is here.

Dieter Bohn: Hello, hello.

Nilay Patel: Ashley Carman is here.

Ashley Carman: Hello.

Nilay Patel: This is actually a really special episode of the Vergecast. We’re live at Mozilla’s Glass Room in San Francisco. We’ve got a crowd. The crowd is here. That’s pretty good. We have two very special guests. We have Isaac Reynolds from Google...

Isaac Reynolds: Hello.

Nilay Patel: ...and Robby Stein from Instagram.

Robby Stein: Hey, everyone.

Nilay Patel: 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? That’s just going to take us into the entire night. It is also literally Halloween, and The Verge...

Dieter Bohn: Also, it’s my dad’s birthday. Happy birthday, dad.

Ashley Carman: That’s sweet.

Nilay Patel: Well, now I can’t say the mean thing I was going to. The Verge also turns eight on November One, so it’s going to just be... Everyone’s in a great mood. We’re going to have some drinks later. If you’re listening to this in your car, and it seems like it’s getting a little sideways, just know it was Halloween, and it’s our birthday party. You can’t get too mad at us. Let’s start. Isaac and Robby, I want to ask you both. Robby, you are the director of product at Instagram. Describe what that entails.

Robby Stein: Sure. I support the consumer product team. Focus on Stories, Feed, messaging, and the tools that help you connect and share with people you care about. I’ve been at Instagram for three and a half years. Our team originally launched Stories. We’ve done changes to Feed, like with the multiple posts to Feed, indirect messages, being able to share photos more easily. Creative tools within the camera, like Super Zoom and Boomerang. All that fun stuff.

Nilay Patel: Isaac, you’re the product manager of the Pixel camera.

Isaac Reynolds: Right. I’m the lead product manager on the Pixel camera, focused on software. I help the team put together a roadmap for the coming years of what we’re going to do in computational photography, and try to change how people think about taking photos, and taking videos, and things like that.

Nilay Patel: Having the two of you together on a stage to have this conversation is particularly interesting to me. I’m very excited about it. First of all, we’re just in the moment in the tech cycle where all the cameras came out. It’s always like a mode... It prompts me to think about photos. Then I think the feedback loop of the tools we use to create the photos, and then we share them. You see trends across platforms like Instagram feeding back into the creative tools. There’s not a Vergeier thing. That’s the project I think we started the entire site to... It’s our birthday.

Robby Stein: Happy birthday.

Nilay Patel: That’s why we have it. That’s why we made the thing, is these tools help us democratize creation. I’m very excited to have you both here together. I do want to start with this photo, with this question that is... It sounds a little silly, and it’s a little philosophical. It is extremely Dieter Bohn...

Dieter Bohn: Hi, everybody.

Nilay Patel: ...in its way. 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 several slices, and then... He’s just smiling at me. He’s like, “It’s a photo.”

Isaac Reynolds: It’s nuanced.

Nilay Patel: Yeah. Then Robby, Instagram, just at its core, is filters, and AR effects. 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. Isaac, let’s start with you. What is a photo? Do you take photos? Do you make them?

Isaac Reynolds: I never take photos. Actually, I was going to 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.

Dieter Bohn: Aww.

Isaac Reynolds: We focus it on...

Dieter Bohn: It’s very nice. That’s not a sarcastic “aww.” I really do like that.

Isaac Reynolds: I was serious. It’s about reminiscing, and remembering, and capturing moments forever that maybe you couldn’t capture before. Night Sight, for example, is our very, very ultra low light mode. 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.

Nilay Patel: That is very, extremely depressing, existentially.

Isaac Reynolds: Now, with Pixel...

Nilay Patel: All right, Robby, what’s a photo?

Robby Stein: 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. I think for us, and for me, and how I use photos, probably more times than not, it’s actually for the purpose of sharing and communicating information.

Nilay Patel: When I think of a... Well, I think when most people think of a photo, they’re like, “I pushed the shutter.” We slice, capture it. That moment is frozen. Isaac, 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?

Isaac Reynolds: I don’t think so, and the reason is because, at the end of the day, we take all these images together, and we pick one of them to be the photo. 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. All the other images that we merge into it just go to making that cleaner, sharper. Look nicer.

Nilay Patel: Enhancing reality. Improving reality. You see where it gets fuzzy.

Isaac Reynolds: It could get fuzzy, yeah. I’ll give you 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 de-noise 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? 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. There’s this huge amount of computation and nuance that goes into the image that you get, and it’s definitely a fine line that we try to walk.

Nilay Patel: Is there a far boundary that you won’t cross?

Isaac Reynolds: Ooh.

Nilay Patel: For example, I know that I’m very handsome. My camera seems awfully confused about how handsome I am.

Isaac Reynolds: Yeah, there are certainly lines that we won’t cross. We at Google as a company think it’s important to worry about face retouching and beautification. There are certain lines in there that we won’t cross. We want everyone to look like the most authentic and best version of themselves, which doesn’t mean modifying people.

Ashley Carman: How do you balance people’s need to look good in their selfies? I want to look good.

Isaac Reynolds: You do look good, but...

Ashley Carman: If I’m going to share it to Instagram, like an Instagram is willing to make me look better. How do you think about...

Isaac Reynolds: Well, 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 going to see it next. We focus on low-light, detail, dynamic range, color accuracy, and giving you the most flexible thing you can work with later on.

Nilay Patel: Robby, is that how you think of it, too? Because you, on the other hand, it’s... The first thing you do on Instagram is edit, right? The assumption I think that you probably have is that people are going to start modifying the image. Do you have a far line, or is there, like, “We just know it’s going to happen?”

Robby Stein: I think for us, we want to... Look, the point of the Instagram camera is to share and communicate what you’re doing, where you’re thinking, and what you’re feeling. We want to inspire you to be able to share and connect. Feel comfortable doing that, and be able to actually interact with people. 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. It’s things like, “I love this,” or, “Wow, this is awesome.” What we’ll do is we’ll use AR, and inject. Like in Super Zoom, the multiple hearts that zoom in slowly with a twinkle music. It’s like, “Wow, I’m obsessed with this thing.” For us, it’s about the expressive and emotional aspects of the camera that we try to do. We focus on those use cases much more than all the fine grain things around how you look.

Dieter Bohn: 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 a documentary truth of a moment in time? Because the whole purpose of it is to modify it and send it out?

Robby Stein: 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.

Dieter Bohn: You just worked that right in there.

Robby Stein: You want to feel authentic, because you want to really feel connected, like you were there with your friend, basically, through the camera. 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.

Ashley Carman: 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?

Robby Stein: It could be playful, just like, “I’m feeling goofy, or bored.” Sometimes just a post to get a reply from someone, and then start a conversation on direct, because 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.”

Nilay Patel: One thing I have been thinking about a lot as we review this next generation of cameras on phones in particular is that the Pixel has a very obvious look. I’m pretty consistent. I can spot the Pixel photo out of 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. I like your camera. We’re done here. That’s it. It’s a very clear look. We were talking to Mark Levoy at the recent hardware event. He said, “We know we have a look. This year, we changed the look a little bit.” Instagram is all trends and looks all the time. 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 Leibovitz yelled at us a lot.”

Isaac Reynolds: Which happened, by the way.

Nilay Patel: That’s really the answer I’m hoping for here, is a long digression on Annie Leibovitz yelling at the Pixel team. What are the inputs for you, when you... Because you’re only changing it year to year, whereas I see on Instagram, it’s week to week.

Isaac Reynolds: Well, users are the big input. That’s why I like to come to places like this. I get to learn what users want. To be honest, when you build the camera, you kind of become a little bit of a tastemaker. 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.

Isaac Reynolds: We take our role as tastemakers very, very seriously. We have a team of people who are very, very deeply embedded in image quality. 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 Mark 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. It happens to look really good for landscapes in particular, and sunsets.

Isaac Reynolds: When we go out and change it, it’s usually because we’ve heard some strong feedback that maybe this look works in someplace, but not another place. 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 half the photo’s this beautiful sunset, and half the photo’s a portrait.

Nilay Patel: I don’t know. The Pixel 2 came out. It was the first really aggressive HDR camera in that way. First really successful computational photography camera. Obviously, Apple followed. The HDR look, where everything is very flat, and the shadows are brought up, and the highlights are dropped down. That just became what photos looked like. That is not what photos have... Everyone’s photos didn’t look like that, until the Pixel 2, and the Apple phones came out. Did you think, “Oh, crap, we changed how people think about photos.” Did you have that moment of, “The feedback loop in the world is most photos now are this much flatter.”

Isaac Reynolds: I think it was more, “This is cool.”

Nilay Patel: Yeah. You were like, “I’m on the winning team.”

Isaac Reynolds: We weren’t so happy about the flat look, so one of the reasons HDR Plus, that signature look, is so moody, is because we didn’t want that flat look. 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. It’s something we designed HDR Plus not to do from the outset. I think it’s really cool that 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.

Nilay Patel: Robby, 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 going to put freckles on your face, even though you don’t have freckles. Let’s just get it done.”

Robby Stein: 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. You don’t want to depart too far, because that’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, and set of colors that we typically do use. Even for the swipe over filters, that have a... Their own... In the same language. I think you’ll notice when you use the Rio filter, and it’s got that pink, semi-transparent gradient, and people recognize that. I do think that’s important for the reason I mentioned.

Robby Stein: We actually just redesigned our camera just a couple 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. We’re starting to see that actually the formats are also as distinctive as any of the color, as well. When you see the Boomerang looping GIF, or you see the funny zoom into the face of your friend, you know it’s Instagram. I think it’s because we built something that matters, and when people use it, they get a certain joy out of it. We think it’s important to keep that consistency long term, so that people have an expectation it’s still there.

Dieter Bohn: How do you think about the cadence of creating those effects, and even the camera releases? Because Pixels and iPhones generally are about once a year, there’ll be a big jump forward, and you are doing stuff once a week, or once every two weeks.

Robby Stein: For us, we’re not really trying to recreate the core, underlying camera, but more extending it in interesting ways. It just works through the use cases of, “Why would you want to use Instagram?” Ultimately, the point of Instagram is to connect and be brought closer to the people that really matter to you. 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. When we built the original version of Super Zoom, we were like...

Robby Stein: People really express humor through the camera. 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. We were like, “Okay, let’s try this weird zoom thing that took this kung fu video shot,” and we actually watched a bunch of YouTube videos. These old school kung fu video, funny mock zoom ins, where you miss your friend intentionally, and then it cuts back over. We’re like, “This is actually pretty funny.” Dramatic chipmunk was another version of it. We built it, we prototyped it, and we just shipped it, completely independent of any release cycle of an underlying camera technology.

Ashley Carman: I feel like Super Zoom came about, though, originally from users doing the quick, finger up zoom. Who do you think is the stronger tastemaker on Instagram? Are you watching what the users are doing, and then deciding, or are you guys going completely off on your own and doing research, thinking about...

Robby Stein: Users are really, really critical to what we build. I think we did notice that people would zoom in very quickly, but the specific example of Super Zoom was probably because it has more humor associated with it. It was probably just less about that zooming motion, but more that people wanted to do something, express something that’s funny. 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. This is epic.’ Whatever it is. We should build a whole bunch of tools, and make that much more expressive with the camera.” Then we got to the Super Zoom, hearts experiences, and heart eyes, and a bunch of the other AR filters that we added.

Isaac Reynolds: Am I allowed to comment, as well?

Ashley Carman: Yeah.

Nilay Patel: My dream is that you two just talk to each other

Isaac Reynolds: I was going to say, you talk about people zooming in when they are taking Instagram videos, and they’re zooming really fast. You zoom in a little bit, come back a little. The dramatic chipmunk look. People use the Pixel default camera very differently from that. From us, when you pinch zoom in, and you go too far, then you have to come back. 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 embedded in your memory forever now. You can never remake that video. It’s done. It’s in bits now. It can’t be changed. We see that as this horrible mistake.

Robby Stein: But it’s funny.

Nilay Patel: This gets at... I mean, this is the heart of it. One of the notes we have is, “What are the jobs that these apps do? That these cameras do?” It seems like you have identified two very different jobs, but there’s a pretty clear overlap, which is the Instagram Grid. 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’ve got a perfect Instagram presence. That’s, the Instagram Grid in particular, is where you want your best stuff. Do you see people using your camera for that, or they are using the create mode for Stories?

Robby Stein: They do both, but I think our camera’s used more for Stories. Because our tool set 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. 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 producing, you’re like, “Yeah, I want to put something on my Stories.” I never want to see that thing again. I not only don’t want to remember it, I 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’ve just... 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 Stories,” and I got a bunch of people to write back to me. I got to connect with people I wouldn’t have spoken to. That was the purpose of using the camera. It was never to have this artifact that I was going to treasure.

Ashley Carman: Do you find that people go back to the archive?

Robby Stein: They do, and I think because...

Ashley Carman: I look at my Stories.

Robby Stein: Well, there’s lots of...

Nilay Patel: That’s a very personal question.

Robby Stein: Well, the thing is, is that there’s a lot of diversity in the use cases. 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. There’s certainly a class of Stories that are like... You just don’t worry about. You’re just putting them on there. For Feed, I agree. That one is much more about highlights, and about this sense of this memory, and memorialization of the things that you’re into. 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? You get a very quick sense, like, “Okay, you have your kids,” or at least mine, kids, and travel, and food, and family. Those are the things that are really important to me, and they’re two different jobs that live in one product for us.

Ashley Carman: We have to ask.

Nilay Patel: Do it. I mean, Ashley...

Dieter Bohn: Here it comes.

Nilay Patel: Ashley’s been waiting to ask this question all day.

Ashley Carman: Did Stories destroy the Grid? Is anyone still using the Grid.

Dieter Bohn: I use the Grid.

Ashley Carman: Okay, you use the Grid.

Dieter Bohn: Maybe I’m a little lame, but I use the Grid.

Ashley Carman: Other than him...

Nilay Patel: One extraordinarily important user of the Grid.

Robby Stein: Yes, people love the Grid. They really do. People love their profile and the Grid. I think for a lot of people, it is the main way, their main representation of themself on the internet. It really is. 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. It really matters to people. People do still spend a lot of time thinking about it, and they really enjoy it.

Nilay Patel: Do you see in the... Your daily usage numbers, the shift towards Stories?

Robby Stein: Stories is definitely a place that can accommodate more use cases, because it’s just this effortless place, where you don’t have to think too much about it. You just post. You definitely see much more of the everyday, casual use case, which was the purpose of Stories. When we originally launched it, it was because we realized people were having to be so considerate in Feed, and it was too difficult. People would be like, “Whoa, is this really something good enough to go on Feed, and then be on my Grid, and live on forever? Eh, maybe not.” We do see a lot, a lot of casual usage on Stories.

Nilay Patel: When you open the... It’s Create mode, when you slide over to...

Robby Stein: Just camera.

Nilay Patel: Camera. That’s the video camera. Do you think, “Oh, we got to... 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?

Robby Stein: Well, it gets back to the jobs. Why is someone hiring the Instagram camera? If it’s ultimately to communicate-

Nilay Patel: Wait, can I just stop you? Do you all know Silicon Valley product manager speak? That’s how they all talk.

Robby Stein: Oh, yeah. I’ll explain the job then.

Nilay Patel: Every single one of you is hiring a software product every day. There’s no HR department. You can fire the software product at will. You don’t have to pay severance.

Robby Stein: 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, but preferably not Instagram products.

Nilay Patel: Anyway, keep going.

Robby Stein: Anyway, so the jobs thing is... It’s just helpful to think about not people using products, but they hire it to do something for them. It helps you just think, “Okay, people were wanting to get something out of the product. That’s why they’re using it.” For us, it’s not to get this crazy, dense memory that you’re going to relive and think about all the time. Again, it’s just to communicate something. Sometimes really goofy, and sometimes completely, you don’t ever want to see again. 4K’s not something that we focus a ton on, and probably won’t in the short term.

Ashley Carman: Are most people using effects on their Stories?

Robby Stein: Yeah.

Ashley Carman: I’m getting the sense that reality is really boring for you guys.

Nilay Patel: Well, again, this is the split, right? Here, we’re like, “We’re going to enhance reality.”

Robby Stein: It’s not boring, it’s just that I think when you’re trying to express something, part of it is the photo. Part of it is, “Well, what am I thinking about?” You’ve put a little GIF thing in there that’s fun, and that explains how excited you are about something.

Ashley Carman: Yeah, a smile’s not good enough anymore.

Dieter Bohn: 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... There’s going to be an output, right? It’s going to get saved in Google Photos. It’s going to get sent as an MMS that is crushed, and terrible, and awful.

Nilay Patel: Dieter, would you like to talk about RCS now?

Dieter Bohn: Should we talk about it? No. No, I wouldn’t. It’s going to go onto Instagram, and it’s going to... Maybe if you’re lucky, it’ll go on a Story, or it might go on the Grid. How much are you thinking about those outputs when you’re trying to save your ideal bits to disc?

Isaac Reynolds: It’s definitely on our list. Actually, what’s bigger on our list... Which it’s funny to hear you, Robby, 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, 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. I would be very happy if that were that were the reality. But-

Dieter: You can make a button that makes that maybe one tap grid share extensions.

Nilay Patel: Oh my God. This is my dream.

Isaac Reynolds: 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.

Nilay Patel: So, one of my least favorite responses to how nerdy I am about photos and our reviews is it doesn’t matter, it’s just going on Instagram, right? You don’t have to crop into the photos as closely as you do and be like, “These five pixels are sharper on this photo and this camera versus the other,” because it’s just going on Instagram.

Nilay Patel: 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 going to hopefully transcend 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 actually, is that true? 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?

Robby Stein: No, 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 you want to see it. And at the time those parameters just change based on the quality of the camera, phone, bandwidth. And so, if you go back to your Instagram grid and your old stuff, it’s going to look a little jankier.

Nilay Patel: But that’s staying static. You’re not really improving that stuff.

Robby Stein: Not that I’m aware of. I haven’t heard of that.

Nilay Patel: Not that I’m aware?

Robby Stein: I mean no.

Isaac Reynolds: You’d be surprised how many layers of software there actually are going on there, there are transcoders. So, 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. There’s is shocking number of layers and transformations that happen. And even something as simple as taking a low res image and turning into a high 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.

Isaac Reynolds: 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 some software layer running on the phone that is completely invisible to Instagram, that is magically making them better through better upscaling. It’s very possible.

Nilay Patel: Do you think about Instagram as an output as you are planning out camera features? Are you thinking, “Most people are just going to share that.” What are the sort of metrics of, “This is happening on Instagram,” that influences what you guys are doing?

Isaac Reynolds: Well, the biggest thing is just we know that people are going to be using Instagram camera, we know they’re going to be sending their photos there. So, I’ll give you a very concrete example. We think a lot about aspect ratios, is one big thing where we pick up-

Nilay Patel: This is so after my own heart.

Isaac Reynolds: In Pixel 4 we actually moved their 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.

Nilay Patel: Ooh!

Nilay Patel: Dieter’s like, “Absolutely.”

Isaac Reynolds: But, it is very important when you take the photo to know whether it’s going to 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 a feed, it’s square but when you look at it, like scroll through other people’s photos, there 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 full screen or 16 by nine? Or four by three? Or two by three? Or one by one? Or circle? Crazy number ratios.

Isaac Reynolds: 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 ones should be the default. Because I wanted to make sure that when you took a picture it was going to look good on Instagram.

Dieter: That’s really nice. See?

Isaac Reynolds: You’re welcome.

Nilay Patel: Dieter’s still going to try to start shit.

Isaac Reynolds: It’s for my customers too.

Dieter: That’s awesome.

Nilay Patel: Truly there’s no more Vergecast moment than, “We’re trying to start some aspect ratio beef right now.” This room is like, “Do it.” And everyone else in the world is like, “What on earth are you talk...?”

Nilay Patel: So you introduced some creative controls on the camera this year with the HDR sliders. That’s interesting because there’s obviously stuff, you’re choosing a capture. But then, because it’s computational photography, there’s stuff you can change after capture. Is there a final file or is there this ever-changing thing that you can mutate in your zone and you’re going to export it to a place like Instagram?

Isaac Reynolds: There’s a sad transition that we have between in camera and pre-capture, post-capture.

Nilay Patel: Yeah.

Isaac Reynolds: So, we do all of our processing in what’s called a raw file format, which has way more information than what ends up on the disc and 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 to a place like Instagram, there’s a lot less flexibility because you just have a lot less data in that file to play with.

Nilay Patel: So you don’t think that Apple lets you 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, you never get to... It’s very nicely maintained. It’s a fucking prison. But once you’re out of that, you can’t change that anymore, that’s a very proprietary... You keep saying disk and that makes me think of file format. It’s like, is there a new photo file format that preserves that beyond just raw, that’s like, “Okay, we’re going to recompute”?

Isaac Reynolds: Oh, depends on what you want to preserve. You actually can modify the blur after the fact for our portrait mode pictures. You can add blur to some pictures that having taken in portrait mode, if you got the right settings enabled, there’s lots you can still do. So you can modify the bouquet, you can turn into a color pop where it’s like the subject is color and then everything is not only blurred in the background, but gray scale as well. So there are definitely things you can do after the fact and we have special file formats for all that stuff too.

Nilay Patel: 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?

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

Nilay Patel: You’re rolling tonight!

Isaac Reynolds: Thank you for asking that, I appreciate that.

Nilay Patel: To get super nerdy, the JPEG standard was a controversial patently... There’s all this stuff of, “We have to make a file format.” So to go from, “Okay, we’re going to 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 recompute that maybe you’re going to do differently than me.” Then obviously, that’s a whole process. Are you interested in your camera shipping out a file that can do that?

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

Nilay Patel: Yeah, so if I wanted to take your HDR+ file and I want to do my own computational photography?

Isaac Reynolds: Right. So, we got all sorts of outputs in camera 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 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 some little stabilization metadata in it as well, which is interesting, it comes from the gyroscope.

Isaac Reynolds: We’ve got raw output so you can actually get this 14 bit HDR+ raw image that you can put into a Light Room or a Photoshop, or something and do really cool stuff with. So when I talk about, you get an image on a camera and then it’s yours, we’re actually embeddeding a lot more in that image than just the traditional little JPEG.

Nilay Patel: But do you want an ecosystem to develop around that stuff? 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, it’s just actually eating up the storage on my 64 GB Pixel 4 base model. Right. Sorry. It’s just what I think about. How do you build an ecosystem around that additional data?

Isaac Reynolds: 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.

Dieter: So, Ash and I were talking earlier that Apple or Google, they have this horse race of who can have the best portrait mode. And it seems like Instagram is just like, “Meh.” Do you not-

Nilay Patel: Do you have a fake portrait mode?

Robby Stein: Yeah.

Dieter: Do you care about portrait mode? Yeah?

Robby Stein: We have portrait mode. It’s cool. 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 sport and people like it, they use it, but yeah.

Nilay Patel: To this other conversation, is there data you want from cameras that you’re not getting as you think about your future roadmap? It would be great if when the camera’s lit up we could use these other three sensors to create a new kind of effect. Are you in those conversations or are you just like, “We’re going to get what we get and we’re going to do our thing”?

Robby Stein: I think it would be great. 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. Low lighting’s one thing that comes up all of the time. It’s very frequent on Instagram because in social, the point of Instagram camera is to share stuff mostly, and when you’re doing stuff it’s usually poorly lit and you’re in a restaurant, or in your room, or wherever. And 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.

Ashley Carman: So Snapchat is going all in on this 3D mode using the iPhone’s depth sensing. What’s holding you guys back from it? Is it politics of the deal and accessing the sensors? Why aren’t you going in on those filters?

Robby Stein: Yeah, I think we mostly just look at what’s going to be the thing that’s going to be 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 if 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 with them yet. And so, we really try to wait until we find something that really is going to help the whole community more. We just had other priorities right now.

Nilay Patel: I think the iPhone 7 is the most popular iPhone on the 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, “This just isn’t that important.”

Robby Stein: It’s mostly just what we think is going to be most important. I think if there’s something really cutting edge and new that a small group of people are starting to use it, 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 of our time. But otherwise, if it’s, “We’re not sure,” and we don’t have conviction, there’s lots of problems where we really know our problems, we’re going to focus on those first.

Isaac Reynolds: I will say this is a chicken and egg problem. So, on my side it’s the person capturing the data and putting [inaudible 00:35:07] for apps like Instagram to play with, the data has to be there for Instagram to do something with it. There’s this funny setting in Pixel 4 that lets you save depth data with every photo that you take and it’s 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 good apps making use of it already. Facebook actually uses it, which is really cool. The newsfeed does. But we Have to lead the industry a little bit on Pixel to make sure the data is available for them to even decide if it’s worth doing for their customers.

Nilay Patel: 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 going to keep it and keep iterating on it because people are using it,” versus, “Well, that was a good idea but we’re going to drop it and move on to the next thing”?

Isaac Reynolds: I think a lot of it comes down to a similar answer. 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 those things basically.

Nilay Patel: All right. I think we’ve got a few minutes left and I want to make sure we get some questions. So now, I’m basically just going to list feature demands of the video.

Isaac Reynolds: Ouch. That’s going to sting.

Nilay Patel: It’s not a total surprise because I tweeted it and I know they both saw it. But you’re still here man, you’re still on stage, the lights are on, the cameras are pointed...

Nilay Patel: Yeah, so they’re waiting for it.

Robby Stein: Let’s hear it.

Nilay Patel: So, Isaac, number one-

Dieter: The bullet!

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

Isaac Reynolds: 4K 24 or 4K 60?

Nilay Patel: Yeah.

Isaac Reynolds: Why can’t it do those things? I think the answer is that nobody needs those things.

Nilay Patel: Wow.

Isaac Reynolds: Well, I shouldn’t say nobody.

Nilay Patel: Wow.

Isaac Reynolds: I think-

Nilay Patel: Don’t y’all own YouTube? Because I feel like I know some people who really think they need those things, so very influential.

Isaac Reynolds: Whenever you look at a camera, 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 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 going to invest in the default mode, default capture, 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, so I’m not going to say never, just not right now.

Nilay Patel: Is that something in your current phone could support if you needed to put the resources towards it or is that wait a year?

Isaac Reynolds: It’s another one of those nuanced answers because certain components in the phone could support it. We have enough memory bandwidth to move that 4K 60 resolution, right? That part works. Other parts don’t. 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.

Nilay Patel: So, 4K 24 is the other one that everyone asked about, which is if my math is correct, less than 4K 30. So you need 4K 30 because you just light up 4K 24?

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

Nilay Patel: I’m told that’s mad science.

Dieter: Oh my God.

Nilay Patel: but one number is smaller than the other.

Isaac Reynolds: I think it’s just simple math.

Nilay Patel: All right.

Isaac Reynolds: This whole thing is just a delaying tactic to make sure that Ashley doesn’t literally-

Nilay Patel: Ashley’s list is way longer. But Robby, 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?

Robby Stein: Yeah, it is. 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, “I want my video to be higher quality on the playback. It seems kind of weird and 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 really pissed. And so it’s a really, really difficult trade-off but we’re absolutely, absolutely trying to give you the the best possible compression and quality for the conditions you’re in. And 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.

Nilay Patel: Do you think that there should be a Instagram pro mode? Where-

Robby Stein: What would you want with it?

Nilay Patel: There’s a lot of transcoding going on, as you guys are talking about. 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”?

Robby Stein: Like you’re willing to wait longer?

Nilay Patel: Yeah.

Robby Stein: And I go on wifi and whatever? It’s interesting. Yeah, I don’t know. I 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.

Nilay Patel: All right, Ashley.

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

Nilay Patel: I think everybody wants everything to get better over time for free.

Robby Stein: Okay. Yeah.

Nilay Patel: And it’s-

Robby Stein: Unless it’s Star Wars movies.

Nilay Patel: Does anybody not want that to happen?

Isaac Reynolds: Yeah. That was a cool idea too. That was pretty rad. That’s cool.

Nilay Patel: All right, Ash?

Ashley Carman: Oh. This is not about the camera. This is just my beef.

Isaac Reynolds: Go for it.

Ashley Carman: You know?

Isaac Reynolds: Yeah. You got beef.

Ashley Carman: I bring this up to you every time.

Isaac Reynolds: I know.

Ashley Carman: When are you getting rid of read receipts on DMs? We need them gone, yeah.

Isaac Reynolds: We need them gone, okay.

Ashley Carman: They need to be gone.

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

Ashley Carman: Am I going to get Instagram Pro before she gets that?

Isaac Reynolds: No, I don’t know.

Ashley Carman: Yeah. That is dark.

Isaac Reynolds: Maybe it comes with Instagram Pro. I don’t know. We’ll bundle it together.

Ashley Carman: No.

Nilay Patel: Oh, this is great. It’s a really-

Isaac Reynolds: But no, it’s a really good point. I think 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-

Ashley Carman: Who are these people?

Isaac Reynolds: I’ll tell you.

Ashley Carman: I know convo with them.

Isaac Reynolds: I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. So who want to see read receipts?

Ashley Carman: Yes.

Isaac Reynolds: People really get worried when they send DMS and they don’t know if people saw them or not. And they’re like, “Oh, did they see them and not write back? Or did they write back? Or do they not?” And it actually creates a lot of 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.

Ashley Carman: Oh no. I don’t want people to know I read their message.

Isaac Reynolds: So just one way read receipt?

Ashley Carman: That’s the thing, yeah.

Nilay 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 a very common feature request on the list is, “Why’d you take that away from me?” This is an integrated product, right?

Isaac Reynolds: Mm-hmm

Nilay Patel: So was your team involved in the decision to put what cameras were?

Isaac Reynolds: 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 are very, very wide. And the one camera on the Pixel 4 is in-between, but it’s much, much closer to the wide side.

Nilay 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?

Isaac Reynolds: Yeah. You know I’m not even joking.

Nilay Patel: Okay. You nailed it.

Isaac Reynolds: It’s actually an interesting thing. For example, if you take a picture in Pixel and then you can go 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 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 do its magic and make it better. So, people really do like to see the magic of what they’re getting.

Dieter: The other wide angle thing obviously is why isn’t there a wide angle on the back?

Isaac Reynolds: So that’s another interesting one. And so, we sat back and we asked ourselves, “If you’re a photographer and you had a 27 millimeter equivalent camera,...,” which everyone in the market, their default camera’s about 27 millimeters, “... what would they ask for next?” And they basically would ask for maybe a 50 or an 85. And once they’d covered 1585, maybe then they go to ask for something wider or maybe something super long, like a 400.

Isaac Reynolds: I’ve shot with 400s and I always wanted more, like I wanted 600. So, when we release 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 about 85. So it’s like having a third lens in your bag, so to speak, at optical quality. And I put that in quotes because people think optical quality means a certain thing, and it’s another very nuanced thing. But we just sat back and thought, “What do photographers want?” And they want to walk around with a bag that has a 28, a 35, a 50, and an 85, and so that’s what we built.

Nilay Patel: But so you’re in this moment now where it seems like a lot of photographers want that ultra wide too? Just judging from their replies to my tweet. 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 going to put our energy over here”?

Dieter: To was it, “We max out at two on the back,” because that’s the rule?

Isaac Reynolds: No. There’s no particular rule.

Nilay Patel: Okay.

Isaac Reynolds: And I wouldn’t say that it’s not important either. 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 20 millimeter, 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.

Nilay Patel: I’m going to send you the tweet. Robby, the next one, tons of people actually, iPad app.

Robby Stein: iPad app question. That I get more than probably almost anything. That’s a big one.

Nilay Patel: Yeah.

Robby Stein: Not right now.

Nilay Patel: Really?

Robby Stein: We’re going to keep prioritizing and thinking about what’s going to 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 want to 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.

Nilay Patel: Does Mark Zuckerberg have an iPad? I find a lot of iPad apps are built because CEOs are like, “I don’t need a lap top.”

Robby Stein: I don’t know. I’m not sure.

Nilay Patel: I’m just no going to do Outlook and get through my day. That’s just 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 Catalyst, right? We just had Kayvon Beykpour from Twitter on the show, and he was like, “Yeah, 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?

Robby Stein: I think it’s something that makes a little easier. We’re definitely going to look at it probably a little bit more over time. I think it’s just when you look at the core use case, why are you using Instagram every day? It’s like you got those few seconds, you’re in between, where you’re moving, and you open up your phone. It’s very mobile oriented. Everything from the affectation of resolution crop, how the whole thing is considered; it’s mobile first, and it’s really a communication oriented product. So, yes, I think it would be pretty rad to have 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 a little easier, and we’ll keep revisiting the question.

Nilay Patel: All right... So, you hear about the iPad app all the time, and you’re like, “Yeah, it’s not worth it”?

Robby Stein: Yeah. Because there’s just so many... There’s a lot of users 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 this.”

Nilay Patel: I would love to see that, actually. That would be great. Ashley, do you want to ask this question? I’ve got a long Ashley list here.

Ashley: Oh, well this is still about DMs.

Nilay Patel: Yeah, I mean, I know.

Robby Stein: Give me some more DM feedback.

Ashley: Clearly I’m very oriented on DMs.

Robby Stein: You love DMs.

Ashley: 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?

Robby Stein: 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 people and I wish we could make them because some people would probably enjoy them. But then when we look at the actual web usage just in general across Instagram traffic on WWW versus 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.

Nilay Patel: All right. I got one more for you.

Robby Stein: Go.

Nilay Patel: Why are no front cameras stabilized?

Robby Stein: Oh, that is actually a great question. That’s a fabulous question.

Nilay Patel: Nailed it.

Ashley: Stack it up. Stack it up.

Nilay Patel: Someone from Twitter asked that question.

Robby Stein: I’m going to 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 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 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 and then you put these little magnets on each side of it and use the magnets to 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 four, and have that OIS in the front, and have it all kind of fit in the package.

Robby Stein: So you’re right. If you took 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.

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

Robby Stein: In general?

Nilay Patel: Yeah.

Robby Stein: That’s a good question. I’d say yes.

Nilay Patel: And that’s just because of what you’re seeing.

Robby Stein: I think that like... It’s hard. I jumped to yes. But I think that when you see people and the emotion and yourself, 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. It’s probably the most valuable things on my phone versus, I’m trying to think of the things that 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.

Nilay Patel: Yeah, you’re stuck.

Isaac Reynolds: No, I’m not. I’m not stuck. I actually do think the rear is more important. 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, hanging out, trick or treating because it’s Halloween today. Kids trick or treating. It’s rear-facing cameras.

Nilay Patel: By the way. We both did that.

Robby Stein: I did that right before I came here, trick or treating with my daughter.

Isaac Reynolds: It’s just a more flexible camera. You can do more with it. You if you only have... If you could only have one a front to our rear, I think you’d choose rear.

Nilay Patel: I don’t know. I think that’s not... I mean, I’m still the person who carries around our cameras so it’s like, which of 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 where is the best camera pointing, I would almost certainly want it...

Robby Stein: If you get the back facing quality face the other way.

Nilay Patel: Yeah. Have you seen that wild ASUS phone that motors over?

Isaac Reynolds: It’s great. It’s the best.

Nilay Patel: I mean, it’s great. It’s like what is the best thing about Android? Is that people get to make insane hardware. And ship it and ASUS was like, “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 I’m super into it because I get to take the highest quality photo this way.” And I think that conversation is going to change over time.

Nilay Patel: All right. I want to make sure your questions from the audience. We got a microphone over there?

Audience member 1: Yeah. So this question is for Robbie. Just anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of people on my Instagram feed use a lot less filters. So I’m just kind of wondering, this was a really original feature of Instagram. How does that affect the product as it’s being developed that this original feature’s essentially something that people don’t want to use anymore?

Robby Stein: Yeah, I think filter usage is going down for sure and people used to have these really heavily stylized, bordered photos. Interestingly it is coming back a little bit. Particularly younger folks are using these very vintage style, old film kind of things. So I wouldn’t go as far as 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 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.

Robby Stein: 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 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-

Nilay Patel: Wait. You can turn down the filter in the stories?

Robby Stein: 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.

Nilay Patel: Wait. Is that in the grid or in the stories?

Robby Stein: In the grid.

Nilay Patel: Sorry I thought there was yet more hidden UI in stories.

Robby Stein: Not in stories.

Nilay Patel: Which is another list of questions I have here. All right, we had somebody over here.

Audience member 2: Thanks for doing this by the way. I’m curious about how do you guys think about not just the photos 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, what are the feelings or experiences that you want to have when people do that? Because looking at my Instagram from five years ago, it’s cluttered with these crazy filtered, super de saturated photos. And I wonder if you build products around that.

Isaac Reynolds: Sure. I’m not a product manager for the Google photos team, so I can’t really speak for them. But we like to call it reminiscing. So I think you’re talking about having the style that you had five years ago that you no longer have, which is like, “Okay, the jeans went out of fashion.” 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 look, the right gaze between two people in a photo that makes it a really meaningful moment. And that’s one reason. 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 about the moment. So luckily that’s not an issue that we have to deal with of styles coming in and out over time.

Robby Stein: 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’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 if they want to connect over. And so I think if we actually could do a better job, if we had different resources it would be awesome. In archive differentiating between my ugly selfie, happy photo of the nationals winning the world series and a moment and I do actually want to... Or maybe I would want to see that one again, but probably not that version.

Robby Stein: Maybe the nicer one. It would feel really nice to separate those and say, “Okay, these are the things I really want to relive. These were just funny, stupid 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.

Audience member 3: Hey, I have two questions. Both of them are Instagram related, so I apologize. But the first one is longterm hopefully, I guess. And then the second is shorter term. So it’s Armageddon, there’s a giant meteor header for the Bay area, what is the game plan? Vine died and I lost all of my vines and I’m so sad. What is the plan for my Instagram grid photos? Number 1. Am I going to get download them? Number two is the Instagram cosmetic surgery effect ban. How’s that working? How’s that process going? And I mean, people are uploading those things every day. Now 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?

Robby Stein: Okay, cool. Good questions. I’ll take the last one first. So people who don’t know, the Instagram camera opened up a series of affects for partners to be able to build feature effects into the camera itself. It’s happening around around August. And a few of the effects that popped up that we didn’t realize were going to 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.

Robby Stein: Wellbeing and people’s wellbeing is our absolute top priority. If we don’t have that, we have nothing. So we’ve removed those. They are 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. But those types of filters are not supported by Instagram. And we’re removing them. On the other question about Armageddon, I think... Is it more of a data backup question, how do you get your stuff out?

Audience member 3: Okay, so when vine died, we had... 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 ever 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 going to happen to all my photos. Am I going to have an option to download them?

Robby Stein: Yeah, I mean, the way we would approach this is these are... You own it. These are your content.

Audience member 3: Is there a plan I place though?

Robby Stein: There’s not a plan for the meteor plan.

Speaker 3: I mean, maybe think about it.

Robby Stein: You’re raising good questions. We work for you. They’re your photos. You should be able to have them. It should be real easy for you to get them and keep them safe.

Nilay Patel: Should you build that now for data-

Isaac Reynolds: Yeah. Why can’t we just do that right now?

Robby Stein: You can download your photos. I mean, I think it’s something that we’re going to look at. I think part of the portability and just in general just good hygiene should be something we support over time. I think it would just be a question of exactly when we could get it done, but it’s something I’d like to see.

Ashley Carman: For the filters question, where is the line with that? Because it might not be explicitly a plastic surgery filter, but something that makes your face thinner and teens who are growing up literally only seeing filtered faces. And you guys care a lot about bullying and all that. How are you thinking about mental health going forward and where the line is and what filters are allowed on the platform?

Robby Stein: Yeah, that’s a great question. Historically, when we’ve built filters for ourself, we did not have filters that altered or changed the size and shape of your face, and 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’ve got to take a hard look at this. I think it’s going to 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.”

Robby Stein: And I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” And the other side you hear stories like what you’re mentioning. And so I think it’s just finding that balance to be something that we have to continue to do. 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 sharing what you love, feeling good, being goofy and those types of things was what our camera really is for. And not for things that really the camera is, we don’t think the cameras should be for.

Nilay Patel: So I actually want to ask that question [inaudible 01:02:35] 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? There’s a line of okay well noise reduction sort of just smooths your skins, so just it’s the light. You’re just like, “It’s happening to you. Great. Accident.” Versus we actually need a beautification mode to go compete in sort of the markets where that stuff is the standard.

Isaac Reynolds: We do actually have a, we call it face retouching, not beatification, and 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. Straight. 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. 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 a bunch of wedding photographers.

Isaac Reynolds: Because that’s your most important moment on your most important day where you have to look good but you, because you’re going to 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.

Nilay Patel: What are the specific things that you do?

Isaac Reynolds: So the big one is skin smoothing. That’s the most important thing. But there are nuances to how you do skin smoothing because there are these, we call them frequency domains, but it’s basically there are very, very small features on your face like pores and that’s very high frequency. And then there’s stuff splotches. 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.

Isaac Reynolds: So we try to be kind of intelligent at how we correct... Not correct, but we take away the parts, what you look like today that isn’t you. It’s like whatever happened to you today, we try to take that away. And make you look like you just walked out of the bathroom in the morning and looked really great. So we have actually lots and lots of thinking and I’m thinking of multiple documents and slide decks 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.

Ashley Carman: That’s fascinating.

Nilay Patel: Yeah. My wedding photographer retouched all of our photos and that’s partially the nightmare. Some people have a very heavy hand. Were you thinking about them actually retouching the photos or what you look like on the wedding day?

Ashley Carman: Sorry, what do you... Say you it again.

Nilay Patel: I, mean, our wedding photographer is great. Everybody hire him. It’d be really fun. Can you imagine the nightmare of being my wedding photographer and I was like, “What camera are using?” They were very patient with us. But 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?

Isaac Reynolds: 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 called... It’s kind of raising exposure. There’s this wonderful thing that we call the Glow, when you take-

Ashley Carman: Call it highlighter.

Isaac Reynolds: Huh?

Ashley Carman: Highlighter. Women have figured this out.

Isaac Reynolds: We try to do the glow without that, but we tried to capture the glow which has a lot to do with exposure in tone mapping and 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, some people have those crazy curved mirrors for doing makeup and you can actually, that’s intentional so you can see the pores. Most people, you stand five feet away from a mirror, look at yourself in the morning and go, I look good.

Ashley Carman: Wow. I am so fascinated by your focus.

Nilay Patel: This is great.

Isaac Reynolds: We’ll replicate that feeling.

Nilay Patel: Okay. We’re way over time. But I wanted to end on this question because we started with the big existential question, 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? [inaudible 01:06:59]

Isaac Reynolds: That’s a large question.

Nilay Patel: Yeah, you got four seconds.

Isaac Reynolds: Oh, man. I actually think that there’s a lot of quality left. And I mean quality in a very, if you zoom out the picture and you look at the whole thing 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 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.

Nilay Patel: Robbie.

Robby Stein: The last point he made took my point which was I’m really surprised still actually just based on how quality the technology is and how much time and effort goes into this. How there is still diff when you take a photo and you’re like, “I don’t remember looking that way at all.” Either it’s the lighting or the low editing 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 in the AR VR space, you really get a really relived potential experience, which I think would be really exciting for people.

Nilay Patel: That’s great. Well thank you both so much for doing this. Thank you all for coming. I got to say this is why does the verge exist for this extremely nerdy conversation about cameras? So thank you for indulging us.