Clockwise from top left: large plastic finches at the garden centre, sunrise in a Cardiff hotel room, two jazz musicians batting the breeze at Merton Abbey Mils, and a well-scrubbed highwayman outside Hamleys toy store. Click to zoom
I love the Instagram app on my iPhone – such a lovely way to share random images that catch your fancy – and to see snapshots from other people’s lives. Rationally it makes no sense – it takes photos, knocks the resolution down to a square 612×612 format then makes them look like old Polaroids – and is completely free of charge. How does that work, then?
Within the iPhone app you can see your collection of Instagrams and those of other users – and every picture has an individual link to where it can be viewed online. But you can’t access your pictures directly via the front end of the Instagram website – there’s no “account” or “photostream” where you can see Other Photos By This User. On the other hand you can freely post them elsewhere using Flickr, Posterous, Twitter, Facebook or even plain old email.
But the real action takes place within the app on your phone: you get access to a thriving community subscribing to and commenting on each others’ pictures – in a space that’s fenced off from the main web. It’s strangely addictive – but of course yet another way to waste time when you should be Getting On With Some Work.
Meanwhile if you desperately want to see all your Instagrams together on the web, well Joshua Inkenbrandt‘s dedicated Inkstagram (see what he did there?) makes it possible. More of my digital Polaroids on Inkstagram here or on Flickr here.
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