Chocolate and Instagram

It’s perhaps one of those iOS apps you either love or hate. I’ve been using instagram on my iPhone for a while now and I’m in the love camp – I like how you can easily crop and add filters to your photos and share them on twitter and Facebook. I also like how other instagram users can “love” your image and comment on it away from other social media using the instagram app.

Instagram is a free social media photography app that allows you to take and share photos with or without pre-set filters directly from your iPhone.  It has a very simple interface that shows your own, your friends and random popular snaps, and links with twitter, Facebook, Flickr and foursquare for sharing purposes.

These photos I took of my five year old mini-lop bunny Chocolate yesterday evening are examples of what you can do with instagram. In each case I’ve added a different filter, which I think suits the particular snap and gives each something different for the purpose of sharing online.

The original photo of Chocolate and the mug is ok – not spectacular of course it’s only an iPhone snap, but it’s cute and I thought worth sharing with my bunny-loving friends. So I stuck it in instagram and had a play with the available filters and chose this one just to give the image a warm glow, something different.

In many cases (like the one above) I will take a quick snap knowing I will be cropping them to a square, and therefore will compose accordingly – I wasn’t worried about the paperwork on the left or the plates on the right of the original shot. As for choosing which filters to use when, I tend to choose the image first then apply different filters until I particularly like the look of one.

I only use instagram for social media sharing, it’s a “for fun” app not there for serious images (the resolution of the edited image is only about 1400 pixels square at 72dpi).  In many cases I won’t use any filter because I like the image just as it is. But I do rate the app highly and will continue to use it for twitter photos in favour of posting on twitter or TwitPic directly, or at least until something even better comes along.

When it comes to browsing other people’s instagram shots, I actually use the instapad app which has a lovely designed interface for viewing, loving and commenting on images. I love looking at the photos other people take, although the unhealthy food ones do make me hungry, and the gorgeous seascapes make me wish for the waves. That’s the point though, the reason people post them, right?

There are some downsides to instagram. One is that it is an iPhone only app, it doesn’t even work properly on an iPad, and you can’t upload, love or comment on photos on a computer.  Another is that if you only have a GPRS connection, or even Edge, you won’t be able to upload your pics – you need 3G or WiFi for it to work properly. Considering the small size of instagram images that is pretty poor really.  It also has no Google+ integration yet (many apps and websites don’t).

They say a picture says a thousand words, and instagram is great ways to share yours with your friends and followers.  It might be a just for fun app, but it’s free and worth having a play.

If you fancy following my images on instagram I’m Splodz on there too.