Official Fanpage

Who am I?

Hiya guys – it’s Gee here!

I run the Instagram fanpage over at @sydneyq.fanoffical

I’m a guy, I am 24 years old and I live on the South Coast of England – about ten minutes from the beach.

I am a marketing guy – working for a software company on product design and goto-market strategy.

I feel unbelievably blessed and so proud that I am able to call Sydney one of my very best friends.

The Start

I’ve been working on the Fanpage since February 2020 – I was chatting to Sydney and she mentioned that it would be cool to have some grid pics… she showed me a few pages she liked the look of, and the rest is history.

I try my best to put up a grid pic every day – a mixture of new and old posts from Sydney’s insta.

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Not liked by all

Some people absolutely adore grid pics, others detest them.

I quite often get people telling me they are going to unfollow because their Insta feed gets filled with random body parts when I post.

I’m sorry about that… not a lot I can do really!!!

If you feel I make your Insta feed messy, it’s ok – you’re free to unfollow me – I’m honestly ok with that.

How’s it done

Other people like what I do, and appreciate the hard work.

I often get asked how I do them.

Creating grids is quite time consuming – I do it manually in paint.net on the PC.

I have to size the pic so that it can be divided evenly into squares – always three columns wide, but a different height depending on the specific picture I’m chopping up.

First I centralize it, trying to get Sydney in the middle of the frame if I can, then crop the pic, and add any necessary padding at the top and bottom of the page so that it will chop up evenly into squares.

Then I play with brightness, filters etc… as well as add a nice comment or caption.

Finally, I use a free application called photoscape to chop the original picture up in to squares.

I copy the pics over to my phone, and then upload them to Instagram one at a time… in the correct order (that’s the difficult bit, as I usually do it first thing in the morning, and my brain is not always in gear – I have been known to put fingers where toes go, and have had to start over)

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Followers

Most decent fan pages run at around 10% followers of the original.

I always said to Sydney that it would be my goal to run her fanpage at 20%.

Thanks to you guys, I hit that target after a year of running the page, which was awesome!

…I am also really grateful to some of the shoutout pages too – they have a funny relationship with fan pages usually, but most of them have accepted me and are happy to reposted my content as well as being happy for me to give them a shoutout (I try to do three stories per day, with the various shoutout pages that support Sydney!

Helping out about the place

The other thing I do is help Sydney out wherever I can with the website and store… just admin stuff, and background assistance wherever I can to make her life a bit easier.

She is one of the most determined and hard working people I know, and she puts a lot of effort into making content for us to enjoy, and it’s a lot for her to handle on her own. So I am always really pleased to do whatever I can to help her out, making changes or helping her with her latest and greatest crazy idea (which is hardly ever crazy by the way)

**** January 2025 Update ****

We knew it would happen eventually, and last weekend it did – the bubble finally burst.

Our “friends” at Instagram have changed the layout of the posts from square to rectangular.

…which means that every single grid pic on the fan page (809 of them, which were made up of over 21,000 individual pics) has been completely wrecked.

Here’s what I mean:

Obviously I am absolutely gutted about this – it was a lot of hard work over the years, which has now gone up in smoke. I’m not sure who at Instagram had the bright idea to do this, but they have been getting in a lot of hot water about it. Quite a number of large, international companies have been complaining that Instragm have wrecked their whole online aesthetic because of this change.

Moving Forwards

Over the last week, I have gone through the fan page and deleted every single post – this took quite some time – I had to do them in batches of five hundred, as Instagram saw my activity as “potentially fraudulent” and stopped me from editing, making me wait twelve hours before I could go again.

With a clean slate, I have spent the last few days posting some of the source files I used to create the original grids from – from the start in February 2020 right through to recently.

Apologies to followers for the spam in your feed – a few of you have complained, and I am sincerely sorry for the inconvenience.

Others, just like me, have really enjoyed the retro posts, and it has brought back some lovely memories from the fun we’ve had over the last few years.

Moving forward I will post single pics for now. Maybe I’ll try a grid pic here and there in the future, once thing settle down, we’ll see how things go.

Come and find me

If you haven’t done so yet, please pop over and take a look at the Instagram fanpage at @sydneyq.fanoffical

In the meantime… here is the feed…

That’s about all from me for now – I hope you all continue to enjoy the fanpage!

Cheers,

Gee x