Now Instagram (and its parent company Facebook) are speaking up and denying that it is seeing a max exodus of disgruntled users. The company has released usage figures for the first time in its young life. Read more…
We’ve featured Instagram-inspired presets for Lightroom in the past, and today a new challenger has emerged. The folks over at Really Nice Images has released a couple of preset packs that are designed to faithfully imitate the look of Instagram’s popular filters. What’s unique about this new offering is that the presets aren’t limited to the latest version of the mobile app’s filters — there’s also a pack containing the classic filters that were replaced after Instagram Version 2 came out. Read more…
Given that it’s been almost a month since those terms were suggested, Instagram and Facebook may have been hoping that the controversy would have blown over by this time. Unfortunately, the stats seem to show otherwise. Read more…
There’s a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That’s what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram’s Developer API entirely — problem solved. Read more…
For a fleeting, wonderful moment, it seemed that all of our Instagram popularity dreams were coming true. Released two days ago, the app Firegram used some automatic magic to get your photos way more attention than they would ever have gotten on their own. When Roi Carthy of TechCrunch tried it out on one of his photos he got a whopping 56 likes (%1500 increase) in no time.
Alas, if it seems too good to be true, that’s because it wasn’t meant to last. As of now the app has been “discovered” by Instagram and denied access to its API — no likes for you. Read more…
We can no longer ignore smartphones as legitimate photography gear. As smartphone cameras have gotten better we’ve seen everything from hipstamatic war photography to iPhone fashion shoots, and here comes yet another first.
Of 5,700 entries, Laura Elliot of County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland won first place at a recent National Trust photography competition with her photo taken using only an iPhone 4 and (what else?) Instagram. Read more…
Tommy Edison is an incredible person. Born blind, he has managed to lead a successful, fulfilling life as a film critic, receiving national attention for his spot on reviews of movies like “Water for Elephants.” But in addition to successfully reviewing a genre most would consider to be in the domain of the sighted, Mr. Edison is also a prolific Instagram user. Read more…
If you’d like to receive a regular injection of photographic inspiration, you should consider following along with photographer Brock Davis’ Instagram feed. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based artist regularly shoots conceptual photos with his iPhone that have the same creative touch as photographs Davis shoots for major commissions. Read more…
Engadget and gdgt founder Ryan Block has published an op-ed over at The New York Times on why he has decided to quit Instagram. It comes in the aftermath of Instagram’s policy hoopla, but it’s not the same argument you’ve been seeing all over the web:
As technology companies work overtime to make it easier to sign up and maintain accounts, little regard is given to the long-term ownership and use of our data. After all, it’s far easier for each of us to simply forget and neglect all the random sites and services we’ve signed up for than to keep up with the innumerable changes to opaque terms of service and privacy policy documents, or monitor every merger and acquisition of every company that makes something we use. In fact, to do so would basically be a full-time job, and an excruciatingly tedious one at that.
Block gives an example of how his account on Friendster (once a dominant social network) was eventually sold to a random company geared toward Southeast Asian youth, resulting in a flood of marketing messages. Obviously his argument applies to not only Instagram, but most photo-sharing services on the web today.
There are well over 100 million users on Instagram (assuming a quarter of them didn’t just up and leave), and even though the typical Instagram photo stream consists of food and the family pet, there are certain places that show up more often than others. Times Square, The Eiffel Tower, Disneyland, the Bangkok Airport… wait… that last one seems out of place doesn’t it?
As it turns out, no. Not only is Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport the number one most Instagrammed location of 2012, but Bangkok’s massive shopping mall, Siam Paragon, took second. Only then does the list become populated by the locations you might expect to see. Read more…
