Instagram is a hot topic at the moment. Following Facebook’s $1bn takeover, fans of photography sharing apps are increasingly keen to discover alternatives. Also, there’s been a sudden explosion of great apps that give users additional features. Looking at the results from SimilarSites.com to mind similar sites to instagr.am we found the following interesting alternatives.
Picplz.com
Very similar service to Instagram which lets you share your pictures via facebook and twitter with their app and provides a range of filters to put over the pictures which again, are not very different from Instagram. The two crucial benefits of Picplz.com are that while Instagram downgrades the resolution of your original pictures, Picplz keeps the original resolution. This makes a significant difference when viewing pictures on bigger monitors or when printed. The second advantage of Picplz.com is that unlike Instagram, they have a strong web presence from where you can review your pictures with an online album call Flipboard which groups the pictures together in a neat and exciting way.
Hipstamaticapp.com
Hipstamatic has been around since 2009 and is an extremely popular app – Apple even named it app of the year in 2010. The one big disadvantage with Hipstamatic is that you can’t edit photos that were not taken using the app. What really sets Hipstamatic apart from the myriads of lesser vintage look apps is the quality of the filters. The app has several ‘lenses’ available, each one giving a different vintage look, with some ‘films’ and ‘flashes’ also available to improve the effects. It also gives you the option to print your pictures which isn’t possible with Instagram. The app is also beautifully designed, but it does take a little bit time to get used to. The other disadvantage of Hipstamatic is that it’s not free like Instagram – the basic app costs $1.99 to download.
Flickr.com
Although Flickr is better known as an online service to store high res pictures, Yahoo! revealed its first Android Flickr application in September 2011 which has lots of Instagram-like filters. This app features an activity stream so that you can view recent fotos from your friends in real time and browse through all their past sets and collections, as well as yours. Like with Instagram, you can also see likes, comments and in addition you can view a map to find out where the photos were taken. Like with Instagram, pictures can be shared on Facbook and Twitter. Unfortunately, the filters are not yet available on Flickr’s iOS app so not the best option for iPhone users.
Dailybooth.com
Dailybooth encourages users to have one big conversation about your life in pictures. Overall, it’s a very similar app to Instagram but like Picplz.com, Dailybooth also have a strong website to view your and your friends’ archived pictures. The main difference between them is probably their attitude – whilst Instagram users will try to find interesting things that will look pretty with a filter on, Dailybooth users make the most of their product by using it as a journal that documents their daily routines.
This is an expanding market and there are many more alternatives which you can explore by visiting SimilarSites.com to ensure you find the app that suits you better.
There is good news in this story. Another reoccurring theme with internet startups, like Picnik, is that whenever one good idea is produced, many more follow. Often, the copycat is creative, and introduces a better product. Only by examining other websites like Picnik, can we discover if this is the case.