Action App of the Week: Instagram
Instagram is a fun & quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Whether you’re skating, sailing or playing paintball you can snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel of the shot into a memory to keep around forever.
Setup and Interface
Signing up for Instagram is a quick process: Enter your e-mail address, a username, and password, and you’re ready to go.The app sports a clean, minimalist interface. The main area of the screen is used to display photos. Along the bottom are five icons: a feed of your friends’ latest photos; popular pictures on Instagram; news of recent social activity (new followers, comments, etc.); and your Instagram profile. In the center of all of this is the Share icon.
Using Instagram
When you press Share, you can snap a photo or choose one stored on your iPhone (we like that the app lets you use either of the iPhone 4′s cameras). Once you take (or select) a photo, you can choose to apply one of 14 filters with whimsical names such as “Poprocket” and “Lord Kelvin.” All are variations on a theme, and they make your photos seem like they were taken with a cheap Polaroid camera in the 1970s–which is the point.
After you select a filter, Instagram gives you the option of entering a few details about the photo, such as a caption, where it was taken, and what social networks you want to use for sharing. Options include Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Posterous, Tumblr, and Twitter; you can link to your accounts in Instagram’s settings.
Your photo also gets uploaded to Instagram’s site, where users can “like” or comment on the photo using the iPhone app. While it defeats the purpose of Instagram’s social networking function, you can also make photos private; unfortunately, there’s no way to toggle this option selectively. That means all your pictures can only be private or public.
Instagram is the ideal photo-sharing app for hipsters searching for the next retro-cool app or Polaroid nostalgics looking to reclaim the days of instant-film photography. While its filters are somewhat limited, we like the app’s easy functionality and active community, which has contributed tons of great photos to the service. Even if you don’t plan on posting anything, Instagram is worth downloading just for browsing through users’ creations.
