Instagram – iPhone App of the Week

Instagram – iPhone App of the Week


This is a regular feature of the blog looking at the various iPhone and iPad Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive. Though called iPhone App of the Week, most of these apps will work on the iPod touch or the iPad, some will be iPad only apps.

This week’s App is Instagram.

Instagram is an amazingly fun & simple life-sharing app for your iPhone. Snap photos wherever you go to show the world what’s going on in your life. Follow your friends’ photo updates as they move through the world. Select from photo filters that transform regular ol’ photos into works of art you’ll want to keep around forever.

Free

If you are a regular reader of this column then you know that I do quite like photo Apps for the iPhone. So where do I put all these photographs that I take, well most of them end up on my Flickr account, I use FlickStackr to upload them to Flickr.

However I was introduced to Instagram a week or so back from someone I follow on Twitter. This interesting App (and service) allows you to take photographs with your iPhone (or use a photo in your library), apply a filter and then upload them to a website.

The website hosts your photographs and each image has a unique URL.

You can then automatically post a link to Twitter or Facebook.

It also saves the photo to your phone’s photo gallery. Interestingly all the photographs are square.

Unlike other photo apps though, Instagram is also a kind of photo social network too. Within the app you can follow other people and see their photos, you can be followed. You can view a feed of photographs, you can comment and “like” photographs. There is a feed of popular photographs and some of these are really good.

The thing is you don’t need to do the social thing to use the app and the filters are quite good and interesting. I always think that these kind of filters are ideal for creating images that can be used in presentations, handouts or other learning materials.

As a free app it is certainly a really useful photo app. As a social network, well it is certainly no Flickr and not a Twitter either. The social network can only be accessed from the phone and that limits it in my opinion.

As a photo app it’s great, as a social networking tool, less so.

Get Instagram in the App Store.

9 thoughts on “Instagram – iPhone App of the Week”

  1. Pingback: Tech Stuff

Leave a Reply