Photo Sharing apps - can anyone touch Instagram?

Back in the day before phones were mobile and cameras had a winding mechanism, the main way of sharing photos was by popping the film into the local chemists, picking the prints up a few days later, cursing at the passing stranger who mischieviously stuck two fingers, bunny ear style, behind the head of your subject, and boring your family senseless when you whipped out yet another holiday photo album.  Things have moved on since then, one hopes!

One of the easiest ways to share photos now is to put them online, there are any number of ways of sharing our treasured memories.  It could be Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or any other web based program that allows us to store and share our photographs.  With the relatively recent phenomenom of social media based apps like Instagram, the sharing is pretty instantaneous, it's shared before it's even old enough to be a memory!  Now, I am a bit of an Instagram addict - I discovered it in March 2011, 5 months after it was launched and several million users later, it is still my go to app for photo sharing.  But the recent kerfuffle over the terms and conditions has meant that more than ever previously dedicated users are moving away.  More so than any time before, even after Facebook made millionnaires of its co-founders, when the Android version was launched, or even the uproar over the algorithm change on the popular page!



I have looked at other photo sharing apps, I have probably signed up to all of them, registered my @chelseadebs user name, had a dabble, then forgotten it.  My latest 'projects' are Backspaces and EyeEm, the latter one I joined some time ago but have only recently picked up again.  Like all of them, Tadaa, Streamzoo, Starmatic, they all have quite a large proportion of beautiful images and the ratio of decent images to bathroom mirror selfies and nail polish is pretty good compared to Instagram.  They all have rather nice filters and some have the ability to upload non square format images.  Backspaces has a unique way of grouping photos together as a 'story', which is a rather nice feature.  But the one thing they all lack is the immediate interraction and the sense of community of Instagram.  I see that EyeEm has a growing community base where meetups are organised, but they are not yet anywhere near the scale of 'Instameets', which are organised by over 300 active worldwide groups.

But EyeEm seems to be the closest rival to Instagram and I can imagine their user base will grow each time there is an Instagram hiccup, perhaps the next one will be when it launches on Blackberry, as recently reported.  The thing about Instagram is that it is a victim of its own success, and like other popular social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, will be susceptable to abuse.  The spamming, the porn, the abusive behaviour etc.  But I feel that the Instagram bosses have gone a long way to combat these downsides and at the end of the day, if I don't like it, I could always go somewhere else.  But I won't.  Because Instagram is still the most active and has a great community (have you seen how the @wearejuxt group are raising funds for a friend in need?).

I will continue to give the photo sharing pretenders a run for their money, but something really big would have to happen to make me quit Instagram.  Hell, I can only dream that some fancy brand would want to use one of my photos without my permission!!

Debs
7 February 2013