Instagram

Instagram is a (free!) photo editing app available thru Apple Apps and Google Play Store.

Once you download it to your device, you create a profile and can upload photos from your Android phone (or iPod/iPhone, I assume) to it and from there you have many editing choices for the pictures. Once you're done editing, you upload the pictures to Instagram. You can choose to just post the pictures to your Instagram profile or you can share them on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as well.

Here's a screenshot of my Instagram profile page online (profiles look differently on your phone):

And here are some of my individual Instagram photos:

 Nebraska State Capitol 

(we were stuck outside during a fire drill way too early in the morning!)

 Johnny and Joey in the living room

US Capitol and the Lincoln Mall

December 2012

I believe the only way to upload pictures/use Instagram is via your phone. You can't upload pictures already on your computer (unless you upload them to your phone first, which I did with some Rome pics). When you log into Instagram from your PC or laptop, it is only to view or delete your pictures, or to change your account settings.

There are lots of pros to Instagram, such as cropping, rotating and fixing/changing the lighting in a picture...not to mention the capability to instantly post your edited photo to your Instagram profile and Facebook.

The biggest con is when you upload a picture, you have to crop it, creating a square photo. This can limit your photos, losing people or parts of the picture you'd rather have included. I've found the best way to work around this is to take picture from farther back, with the intention of cropping out the unwanted extra portion of the image later.

I ran across an Instagram tips blog for combining multiple photos into one:
PicFrame ($0.99)
Diptic ($0.99)
PhotoShake! ($1.99)

From just taking a quick look at all three links, PicFrame seems to be the most user friendly and practical app of the three. It may be my first non-free Google Play app! :)


~ Katie