Instagram (for iPhone)

Instagram has become part of the culture, the world mobile culture, that is. So reviewing it is almost academic?hundreds of millions will use it regardless of what I say. Since the last review, Instagram has expanded to include video clips, taking Vine head-on in the video sharing department. Though Instagram has never been much for features?the Snapseed app offers infinitely more control over the look of your photos?it goes the opposite direction with video, giving you more time, some of the editing options Vine left out, and (of course) filters. Like a stubborn weed, Vine will be hard to kill, but Instagram is taking their best shot with this well-thought-out free update for iOS.

If you hate the idea of videos in your filter-festooned Instagram feed, not to worry. There are plenty of clones out there, who are ready to take up the slack. EyeEm is an interesting one with an emphasis on tagging photos for public groups.? Another more recent photo app celeb, Repix, runs with the idea of selectively enhancing just parts of a photo with Instagram-style effects, though it doesn't have its own social network. The Flickr (Free, 4 stars) and Tumblr (Free, 3 stars) iPhone apps also let you take and upload photos to a public photo stream where other users can subscribe to your feed, and can comment on and like your pictures. CloudTalk (Free, 3.5 stars) goes beyond these adding voice messages. Instagram's focus on community is a plus, and the app really can get addictive once you start hopping around among users' uploads.

Signup and Setup
Signing up for Instagram is a lot simpler than it was the last time I reviewed the app: You can just tap the "Use Your Facebook" button to instantly populate all the required fields; alternatively, you can create an account using an email address. You then choose a user name and password. After this, a list of all your Facebook contacts appears, each with a button for following their photos, or you can just hit the "follow all" button. Next the app setup wizard asks to peruse your iPhone contacts to find more users to follow. For those with no contacts, you're shown some popular accounts complete with sample images for your following consideration.

In a Twitter-like setup you click a button to "follow" other users. After finding and choosing folks to follow, the app suggested celebrities and the like for me to add?Rosie O'Donnell, Foo Fighters, and NPR were presented for my consideration. Each of these showed four rotating image thumbnails, in a pleasant UI touch.

Shooting with Instagram
One of Instagram's coolest features was removed when the app was updated for the iPhone 5: You used to be able to show the enhancement filters while you were shooting, but now can only apply them after the fact. Perhaps the company got feedback that this feature wasn't used much or was confusing. An email sent to Instagram representatives on this still awaits an answer.

Unlike Camera+, the camera view in Instagram doesn't add much to the default iPhone camera app?in fact, you lose a couple of options, including HDR and panorama. You do still get to choose a focus-and-exposure point by tapping on a point on the screen image, and you can show a 3x3 grid, change the flash setting, and switch between back and front cameras. Once you've snapped the shutter, you'll see Instagram's trademark style and effect filter options along the bottom.

You also can rotate the image, add a frame (matched to the filter you choose), auto-adjust lighting (a feature called Lux, not available on Android), or choose a selective focus point. This last may be the coolest feature, since it lets your little phone cam simulate the bokeh effect so beloved among photo enthusiasts. A lighter circle follows your finger as you choose the focus point; you can also enlarge or shrink it with two-finger pinch gesture. A linear focus area appears when you tap the drop icon again, for that popular tilt-shift miniaturization effect, which is also nicely customizable with pinching and rotating gestures.

One missing capability when shooting from the app is that re-framing is not possible unless you go back and reload the image from your Camera roll. This is important, because Instagram still restricts you to the square image that fits on the phone, so viewers can't zoom in for a closer look.

There are 19 effect filters in all, ranging from simple B&W to retro film styles to techniques like cross processing. A great infographic about many of the filter's derivation can be seen at 1000memories.com. PCMag has also published another intriguing infographic called What Your Instagram Filters Say About You, which shows, surprisingly, that the most popular filter is no filter at all! I vacillate between finding the artistic/retro filters pretentious and appealing. There are definitely cases where a pedestrian image has been given interest with them.

Sharing Your "Art"
After you've tweaked the image to your taste, you decide how and where to share. You get a choice of enabling the iPhone's geotag, sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare. Posterous is no more a built-in option, with Twitter closing it down after purchasing the social network. You can still, as with every app that creates image, simply share your photographic creation to a friend's email. The recipient needn't have an Instagram account to view the photo, but when I tested this, I got a bard JPG link, with no liking or commenting capabilities.

Back in the iPhone app's feed of uploaded photos from your contacts, you can view popular images, or just news about who uploaded or commented. I still wish you could zoom into fuller size photos instead of being restricted to the partial screen squares. Profile pages now let you view a user's photos in "full size" squares as well as in a grid of small thumbnails, and each has a map for geo A Twitter-like profile page shows how many users are following you and vice versa. In all, the interface isn't especially slick: no one's going to confuse it for an Apple-created app. But it's clear enough, apparently going for a folksy, low-res look.

You can set your photo stream to private, so that only users you approve can see it, but there's no private messaging. Like Tumblr (which lets you post video, audio, texts, and links as well as photos) Instagram isn't about messaging, but rather a stream of socially connected images. Still, a private messaging option wouldn't hurt. Path, another mobile photo-sharing app, has the opposite problem: It doesn't let you view photos of anyone you haven't connected with.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Jg3F5Z5wTgM/0,2817,2387146,00.asp

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