Download happiness

With Facebook’s highly-publicised acquisition of Instagram, photo-sharing apps are back in focus. Here’s taking a look at some of the most downloaded apps

It’s all over the news —Facebook buys Instagram, the photo-sharing company for a whopping $1 billion. Why Mark Zuckerberg would pay twice the evaluated value for the 17-month old company is a million (or literally a billion dollar) question! While we try to figure it out, check out the best five mobile photo-sharing apps available on the iTunes and Android platform.

Instagram

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking services, including Instagram’s own. A distinctive feature confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras. Instagram was initially supported on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch; in April 2012, the company added support for Android camera phones running 2.2 (Froyo) or higher. So good it is that it was Apple’s app of the year 2011. It’s little wonder than that Facebook paid a bomb for this.

Photobucket

Photobucket is a significant Internet photo-sharing site who has released an app for it. It allows you to upload pictures to the site or download pictures from it, as well as sharing them to the likes of Twitter and Facebook. The Photobucket Corporation have additionally released a separate application, called Snapbucket, which lets you edit and add filters and frames to your photos. New users will note the rich UI the app offers and the ability to tag photos, which is superb if you have a lot of images. Viewing pictures is a genuinely pleasant experience on the app and there is an auto- upload feature — similar to that which is offered by the Google+ app.

Path

Path should have been the ‘next big thing’. Lauded as such, the service was blogged about extensively and there was a genuine excitement about its release. The app lets you share photos with family and friends and interact around those pictures. This gives the pictures more meaning and it’s a great way of securely sharing apps with the people you want to share it with. However Path initially held off the release and then along came Google+. Path was launched two days after the search giant’s new social offering, and sadly it practically became irrelevant before it was released. If only they had released it a few weeks earlier! Nonetheless, the app still works fine, and for users who don’t have a problem with joining the Google+ revolution, the app is still a great way to share pictures with the people you care about. The user interface (UI) and options are quite simple but work well and the app is stable.

Tumblr

Tumblr fans with Android devices, hustle over to the Android Market: Tumblr has released an official Android app. With little or no fanfare, this application has appeared with handy tools for posting photos, links and more to your Tumblr. You can take pictures and record audio and video for your posts from within the app, which makes for a very real-time blogging experience that lends itself well to the mobile device. In addition to posting, you can also access your dashboard to read, like and reblog the posts of those you follow. We’re seeing some Twitter integration, as well; you can choose to tweet about your posts as you go.

Flickr

Flickr is arguably the biggest and best known of the photo-sharing platforms and its Internet tenure totals nearly seven years. Owned by Yahoo, the service has only quite recently released an official Android app. The app includes an alternative camera with filters and useful tagging functions. Flickr is both smooth and responsive and allows for a speedy turnaround from taking the picture to uploading. For someone who uses Flickr a great deal this would be an essential download, allowing access to pictures, albums and contacts in one easy-to-use app. For new users it offers the stability and support of an Internet behemoth.

Tags: Flickr, Instagram, Path, Photobucket, Tumblr

Category: Internet