"Sharing impressions in photoblogs", Part 1 - Instagram and MOPOTO

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

I have already written more than once that I consider the iPhone as a wonderful device for photo experiments, of course, adjusted for the "amateur level", since the built-in optics and hardware processing of the image do not even reach the average, non-SLR cameras. But often we do not need it, and sometimes it is even harmful.

How many interesting shots have I made precisely due to the fact that you can shoot very discreetly, simulating viewing existing pictures or typing something on the screen. You can, of course, use any mobile phone for "implicit" shooting, but the iPhone is helped by the viewfinder for the entire (rather big screen), and most importantly, a rich set of photographic and pseudo-photographic software.

I have already talked about several applications for photography, I will talk about others if possible. And today, I would like to give our topic a slightly different bias.

Since we have touched upon experimental photography and "secret photographs", it would be nice to discuss options for exchange, discussion, and demonstration of the fruits of such "photographic work." The most popular, convenient and, in my opinion, correct, is the publication of your best pictures on special services. Moreover, it is desirable that the service had a social component (i.e. a form of discussion, friends' feeds, etc.), and the client for the iPhone, as well as, was easy to use.

Let's talk about several such services and applications today.

In the first place, I will put Instagram - a very interesting photo service, built like a traditional social network or blog, where instead of the usual text entries, it is proposed to publish something by a photo post that surprised you, or pleased, well, or in some other way attracted your attention, with the possibility of discussion. An original solution, working on the principle of "all-in-one", and completely contained in a free client program, like a gin in a bottle.

So what is offered to us:

Share: Ability to download pictures directly from iPhone from Camera Roll or photo albums. You can also take a photo directly from the program while uploading it to the service. Both are almost standard actions for all programs of this type, but we will still mention this during the conversation.

When adding a snapshot, you can even process it a little:

• apply light cropping (for the "square format" of the service, or leaving it rectangular, with borders) by zooming the picture with your fingers
• apply one of several filter presets: X-Pro II, Lomo-fi, Earlybird, Lily, Poprocet, Inrwell, Apollo, Nashville, Gotham, 1977, Lord Kelvin. As you can see, most of the filters are lomographic. Honestly, I'm not guilty:) But apparently this direction in photography is becoming more and more popular.

After processing the photo, you can give a name, or rather a starting comment. In the future, this name will be the first in the chain of discussion of the picture on the "friends' feed". You can also connect sending a picture to popular social services: Twitter, Flickr (we'll talk about it later in this article), Facebook, Tumbler and Foursqare. For completeness of socialization, you can put a geotag. Here it is worth noting that the program takes the data for the geotag at the time of sending based on the data specified by your iPhone, which means it will put down your location now, and not at the time of photographing.

And if you have connected Foursqare, then the geotag can be selected from the placemarks (places) previously created in this social service.

Now, from uploading a snapshot, let's move on to communicating.

Feed Tab - Shows you your friends' feed with the latest photo posts. Under each picture there is an opportunity to expand the discussion of what you saw or put it in your favorites - "Like". Traditional feed like Facebook or any other similar social network.

On the Popular tab, there is a wall-like selection of the best pictures, or rather (as the name implies) the most "liked" by users to their favorites. By the way, a good way to find new friends.

Well, by going to the News tab, we read the comments on our photo posts and consider proposals for friendship (Follow)

As you can see, Instagram is not an ordinary photo hosting, but a social network with a fundamentally different way of expressing your feelings, emotions and thoughts.

The client application itself is very stylish, easy to use and understandable for a beginner. I think there will be no problems even for people who do not speak foreign languages well (note that the interface is only English).

The program is still very young, the release took place on October 6, 2010, but it is not at all crude and perfected to the smallest detail. During the study period (about 10 days) in a fairly active mode, I did not manage to encounter "glitches" or "crashes".

Of the minuses, I will probably only note the lack of a full-fledged version on the "big brother". Those. pictures sent via the link to the above social services will open on a separate page as full-fledged ones, but only iPhone, iPod and iPad owners will be able to go to your feed, account, etc. This is an undoubted disadvantage, as it cuts the social circle into a rather narrow one.

The second for today, I would like to present the MOPOTO service and its free client application.

The service itself is much more advanced than Instagram, has a full-fledged website, and a bunch of options for uploading images, in addition to the described client. First, a couple of words about the ideology of the service: MOROTO - conceived as a social service for the publication of mobile pictures taken by any appropriate device (not only iPhone) - the so-called "mobilography". At the same time, the client application is available only for the iPhone (iPhone users were again singled out), although downloading from ordinary phones is a little more difficult. The service has a rating system, "friends' feeds", the ability to auto-post to LiveJournal, LiveInternet, WordPress blogs and many other goodies. True, there is no interaction with Twitter and Facebook, which is very sad.

The iPhone client offers us:

• Uploading pictures directly from iPhone from Camera Roll or photo albums without any additional. processing.
• Ability to name the picture, put tags and jot down some description. And it's all.

In fact, this is a normal snapshot loader. Thus, we have the opposite, in comparison with Instagram, the situation - on the iPhone we have only the ability to upload pictures, and viewing the "friends' feed", setting "likes" and chatting-commenting, only on a full-fledged site. There is no perfection in the world.

However, MOPOTO achieves its main goal successfully: by taking your emotional photo: you immediately create a photo post in your moroto blog by providing the photo with some text, or without it. The snapshot immediately goes to the "friends' feed" and to the main page of the site. As a result, when you get to the "big brother", you will already have views and possibly comments. The social component of the application (and the service itself) is thus vividly presented.

And for this, I safely recommend you both this free application and this service as interesting and worthy of attention.

For today I will probably put an ellipsis, and will continue this topic in the near future. To be continued…

In the meantime, if you have any questions, write. I will try to accommodate your wishes.

Read on:

"Sharing impressions in photoblogs", Part 2 - Ya. Photos, Flickr, iPics"