For the last couple of years, drones have become so affordable that we can now genuinely talk about a drone footage movement that is rapidly growing on the internet. It all makes perfect sense – internet is always hungry for new exciting and unorthodox content and drone footage is exactly that, and more.

But, drones weren’t always considered so benign and fun. At the beginning of the 2000s, they were used in military actions, and everybody was talking about mysterious “drone strikes”. Some years later, Amazon began delivering their orders by drones, and gradually the term lost its negative connotation. Now, personal drones can be seen flying around and taking beautiful footage or just crashing hilariously. You only need one more ingredient for a perfect match and that ingredient is social media.

However, it is another modern invention that paved the way for the drone photography in the online universe. It all began with GoPro compact cameras which became very popular with people who wanted to document their extreme outdoor adventures. Those footages were always difficult and above all expensive to make using conventional cameras and equipment, and once GoPro came, internet was full of first-person footages of all kinds of adventures. And then, somebody thought that it would be a good idea to put a GoPro camera on a drone. An was he right. Since then, camera-equipped drones became a huge hit.

Now, you can go on an adventure or just travel around the world and pack your drone in a backpack with you and come back home with an award winning footage. Drones are a perfect tool to capture the landscape you are in because they provide the sense of moving through space, and encapsulate the viewers as if they are part of the adventure. And you can be positive that those kinds of videos and photographs are more than welcome on social media, above all Instagram.

Instagram has already made millions of amateur photographers into professionals who live off their work, but the arrival of the drones and aerial footages gave a new dimension to the whole game. Now, we can see parts of the world we never imagined to visit in such spectacular fashion and we just need to glance at our phone.

Travel photography has been widely affected. Professional photographers that use drones for their art are discussing what are the best ways to travel when you carry a drone, and how to avoid law problems in different countries when making aerial footages. And it all pays off once you upload that footage on your Instagram and start counting the likes.

According to Instagram, there are currently 4,822,943 posts tagged with #drone and 1,588,721 posts using #dronestagram. You can find accounts like #fromwhereidrone (136k followers), dronenerds (201k followers) and #chaseguttman who has 50.5k people enjoying his aerial work. And with the introduction of video, Instagram only accelerated the rise of the drone community on social media.

The world is literally in the palm of our hands with drone footages around the globe, but there is a concern here that needs to be taken into consideration. With so many personal drones flying around, one has to ask himself, how long will it take for some incident to occur that will probably change everything. Some countries already have strict laws about drones, and by the looks of it, more will follow, so it is best to enjoy these fabulous footages while we can.