Instagram Brings Social Photo Sharing to iPhone

Whenever you've taken pictures with those high-resolution camera-phones of yours, you must have been really excited about sharing them with your group of friends. But then pictures at times seem bland without editing and sharing them has always been tedious hasn't it? Instagram is all set to redefine photo-sharing in a truly amazing manner.

Born out of a startup about a month and a half back, Instagram has become a hot favorite of mine. The app allows you to apply some great effects to your photos and quickly upload them to various websites, thus combining photography and social networking.

Instagram has been launched initially for iPhone and iPod touch. It hasn't been introduced to the Android, Blackberry and other mobile platforms yet because the Instagram team claims to focus on providing a "solid experience" first on the iOS platform.

The App requires you to first create an account which is a very quick process. You can then proceed to add friends. Now, the integration is such that you can add contacts not only from your iPhone's contact list but also your Facebook and Twitter friends. This enables you to follow clicks from your friends and see the world through their camera lenses. There are other people with rich photo streams and Instagram allows you to follow them(Twitter Style) and comment on their pics, which is a little Facebook-ish. You can also proceed to add friends or send them invites.

Once your account is created, you can create your own photo stream. You have options of either clicking pics or choosing them from your existing camera roll. Before you post these pics, you can add filters to them. This is the best feature this app has, to provide. Instagram provides you with 11 predefined filters which beautifully modify the pics by adding effects to them. You cannot but help adding one of them!

Like I mentioned earlier, the integration is really good. Once you've selected a shot, applied a filter(which is optional), you can specify a caption to your pic and your location. If you do specify a location, you can opt to have yourself checked in on Foursquare. Then you can post the pics and share your photos on a photo-by-photo basis on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

The App provides you with a feed of the latest pics uploaded by your friends. It also lets you check in on the most Popular clicks on Instagram. There is also a dedicated tab that notifies you about the activity on your stream. Overall, a very graphic experience, which you are surely going to enjoy.

If you are concerned about privacy, don't be! There are two modes. If you go public, everyone will be able to view your clicks, follow you and optionally comment on them. However if you chose the private option, you can personally go through all the requests and select which ones to allow.

This is a truly wonderful app, and the best part it that it is available on the App Store free of cost. Instagram as the name specifies, is a combination of two words: Instant and (Tele)gram, and it lives up to its name by providing polaroid type instant pictures which you can share with a lot of ease. Download the App from here and start clicking. You can check out the app's website here: http://instagr.am/. (Gaurav Kheterpal)

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