When it comes to photo sharing social networks, Instagram is the most popular by far. It’s a photo sharing app for the iPhone that connects to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, among others. The premise of this app is to take photos, apply filters and optionally a tilt-shift effect and share it with friends.
You can view feeds of friends’ photos, like them and even comment on them. There’s also a Popular tab for viewing the most liked photos on Instagram, which provide inspiration to the newbies and the mobile photo geeks alike.
The focus is on the Share button, which lets you choose between taking a photo and choosing a picture from your library. Once you’ve taken your photo or chosen your picture, you can select one of the fifteen preset filters, with names like Poprocket and Gotham, add a tilt-shift effect, or even leave the photo as is, and share it via your preferred social network or even email.
Instagram has also added a news feed, with details of which photos your friends liked and commented on, and also a feed showing who commented and like your photos and who is following you. There is also a profile page which gives you the usual statistics regarding followers, people you follow, the number of photos taken and yet another photo feed, this time with only the photos you’ve uploaded.
The only drawback is that Instagram does not have a web interface. There are third party web applications like Webstagram and Inkstagram, which allow you to view, like and comment on photos, but I would prefer to have the option of uploading my photos and applying filters to them online.
Instagram is a fun application, and I’ve taken a few photos, but I must admit, it only gets used on the few odd occasions and while the filters are pretty cool to play around with, they do get old rather quickly.
Do you use any mobile photo sharing apps? Which ones are your favourite? Tell us in the comments.
Love instagram! Haven’t checked out the Popular tab yet, hehe, so thanks for that! But agree, I also only use it occasionally and the filters do get old real quickly, hope they add a few more soon!
It’s a really fun app, but yeah, the filters get old really quickly. However, Camera + has way more filters and effects. I usually use a 3rd party editing app to apply effects, then import it into instagram! :) Keeps things interesting!
I’ve heard a lot of photographers talking negatively about Instagram, saying that it’s getting annoying with people taking rubbish photographs, filtering them and suddenly claiming to be great photographers. I guess that does annoy me too when I think about it. Technology, it allows us to do this, the Photoshop kings of the world and all.
What do you think?
And talking of photography, did you see this:
http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/
The thing with Instagram, is that it lets anyone take pictures of anything. It’s simple enough for anyone to pick it up, snap a picture, and potentially turn it into something aesthetically pleasing. Sure, people take random photos and really misuse the tilt-shift effect, but on the other hand, people are discovering that they have some talent taking photos, and they choose their subjects very carefully. I guess it’s all about HOW you use it.
Yeah, saw that Lytro article, very cool! :)
I dig the whole iPhoneography thing that’s going around, as you said, it’s giving people a chance to explore talent that might have been undiscovered. I guess most industries are like this, for me, in the web industry, these annoying website generators drive me crazy because the end product is usually rather awful and lacks the huge potential possible, each industry will have something :)