I love photography but I am too lazy to pick up my Canon DSLR every day. I reserve it for times we travel or for portraits of friends and family.
With the iPhone 4’s awesome camera, it is my everyday camera to capture anything that catches my attention. I use various photography apps to crop, apply filters, add borders, give it a different effect and then upload it to Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.
I already do this. But, I saw an app yesterday that does exactly what I described – Instagram. You’d think there is nothing new about it.
But, the way they have pulled it off is just plain amazing. They have taken the same idea but put it together in a single app so elegantly and the whole process is as smooth as a baby’s butt.
On initial launch, you create a free Instagram account. Then you find friends from your contact list, Facebook, Twitter or even by name or username. You follow your friends just like on Twitter. Now, their pictures start showing up in your feed ‘wall’.
You can like or leave a comment on each picture. You can go over to the Popular tab which presumably is a listing of pictures with most ‘likes’. It shows 32 thumbnails of the most popular pictures. Not sure why it stops there and not just load 32 more on scrolling down. (scaling issues?)
Now lets move on to how to share your own pictures. ‘Share’ tab lets you snap a picture with your camera or pick a picture from your photo library. If you are on iPhone 4, you can toggle front facing camera as well as flash.
Once you move and scale it to a set crop size in the app, you are presented with a set of filters you can apply to the image. Then you add a title, optional location. You can configure your account to automatically share your final image to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Foursquare.
I am not sure what it is about the app that is so appealing to me but it seems it has taken the App Store in a frenzy as it is now the #1 free Photography iPhone app!
I think this app has the right mix of adding cool looks easily as well as sharing it to popular social networks. And you can do all this so fast.
I think we can use more filters and may be an ability to set the crop size but may be that’s the kind of features that will make an app bloated and confuse the users.
If you are on Instagram, look me up at ‘topiphone’ and leave me a message you followed me from here. I will follow you back for sure. Would love to meet photography enthusiasts among my readers.
I rarely give an app 5 stars but Instagram deserves it.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Availability: App Store
Price: Free
Reviewed at version: 1.0.0
