Instagram is no longer a photo sharing service just for squares. The company today announced that it will finally support portrait and landscape photos and videos with its latest updates on Android and iOS.
Instagram is great on the iPhone. It kind of sucks on the iPad. And it’s nonexistent on the Mac. But Photoflow aims to change the latter.
It’s a beautiful new Instagram client, just for the Mac. And while Photoflow won’t ever replace Instagram on your iPhone, it does supplement a lot of the app’s features for power users.
This week on The Cultcast: Ever wonder what it’s like to have companies pay you to travel the world snapping their Instagram photos? Professional Instagrammer Cory Staudacher shares his workflows and favorite iOS photo apps — and you won’t believe how much some companies will pay you to make them look cool.
Plus: Neat new features coming to iOS 9; Apple quietly beefs up the iPhone 6s to prevent another #Bendgate; and don’t miss our list of new favorite apps.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Build a beautiful new website quick with Squarespace’s drag-and-drop interface. Start a free trial and save 10 percent off any first order with code “CultCast.”
Catch our favorite new apps in the show notes below.
Rock music history is rife with musicians who developed a sort of god complex from money and fame.
A recent posting on Instagram indicates fame is unlikely to corrupt Brittany Howard, lead singer and guitarist for Alabama Shakes, who used the photo- and video-sharing platform to give a fan a guitar lesson.
For better or worse and depending on your political leanings, Donald Trump is said to have won Thursday night’s debate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump also scored a bit of a victory on social media. Whether celebrated or reviled, he was talked about more than the other candidates. Compare the buzz to the professional wrestling term known as heat. Heat can mean cheers for the heroes, but also represent the boos for the heels. Heat in any form is the measure of popularity.
Is it the kind of heat you can warm to or is it just hot air? Either way, the commentary on Twitter and Instagram is entertaining and with a record 24 million viewers watching the debate, the Teflon Don will take all the heat he can get.
Are you tired of your Instagram feed being low on sponsored posts from companies trying to sell you things? If so, here comes the best news you’ve ever heard.
The company has opened up its advertising code to make it easier than ever for partners to get ads all up in the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.
If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time in Instagram during the day. In fact, if you’re like me, you probably spend so much time in Instagram that you wish it was integrated right into iOS, just a swipe away from no matter where in the operating system you are.
Apple’s never going to get around to baking deep integration to the Facebook-owned Instagram into iOS, but here’s the next best thing: a new app that puts Instagram right in iOS 8’s Notification Center.
My biggest gripe with Instagram is the app takes my big beautiful pictures and compresses them down to a low 640×640 resolution. It looks like the company is preparing to change that in near future though, by now storing images in a higher 1080 x 1080 size.
Instagram is already one of the best way to explore your friends lives, and now with its latest update, it wants to be even better at helping you scout awesome travel spots before you hit the road.
The best camera is the one that is with you, so the saying goes. But if that is indeed your iPhone, what is the best photo app? You have several thousand from which to choose.
This can be particularly maddening to older generations, for whom robust digital living seems foreign and frightening. They like the ease of the smartphone camera, but they just want to share their pictures with a few people and store securely without all the extras, like locators, timelines or random followers.
Sherish – an iOS app whose name combines the words share and cherish – was developed for the older user who just wants a few functions, a couple of screens, easy album management and, of course, privacy.
You can spend $90,000 on a Richard Prince “piece of art.” Or you can get the same thing from the original source he ripped off at a 99 percent discount.
Prince used screenshots of people he followed on Instagram and converted them into a large inkjet paintings he then sold for thousands of dollars. Prince did not alert the subjects their Instagram shares were being displayed and sold.
Some of the images were from the popular trend-setting SuicideGirls, whose founder has offered the same pictures printed in the same way for sale for $90 on its website.
Instagram users, adjust your privacy setting and remember the name Richard Prince.
Should he request to follow you, he could one day “appropriate” your pictures and make thousands of dollars off you.
Prince featured 38 screenshots from his Instagram feed in a show in New York City last fall and at the Frieze Art Fair earlier this month, and some of the people featured are just now finding out about their pictures appearing in giant form on gallery walls.
The researchers at Yahoo labs have just quantified the use of filters on digital photos. Say what you want about the death of the art of photography – filters will get your photos noticed.
“We find two groups of serious and casual photographers among filter users,” write the researchers at Yahoo Labs. “The serious see filters as correction tools and prefer milder effects. Casual photographers, by contrast, use filters to significantly transform their photos with bolder effects.”
The best filters for engagement, however, tended to be the ones that increase warmth, exposure, and contrast, rather than the cooler, more obscuring ones.
This is big news if you’re looking to get popular on sites like Flickr and Instagram.
Regardless of what interests you have in your life, there is probably an Instagram feed for whatever your proclivities might be. Into rockabilly or baseball or even stamp collecting? You can undoubtedly find a couple of interesting photo feeds.
Since searching Instagram can be a frustrating and time-consuming endeavor, we have started to do it for you. This week we bring you feeds for baseball fans, vagabonds, parents and a couple of others.
Some restaurants take pride in offering perfect food and wine pairings. Others think more in terms of food and phone pairings.
Yes, you can blame Instagram if your restaurant is a little brighter and the presentation of the food is a bit fussier. Restauranteurs are trying to cash in on our obsession with photographing our meals by giving Instagram users better lighting and compositional conditions to make more appetizing shots.
Instagram has become riddled with so many photos of kitty cats, inspirational sayings and kitty cats spouting inspirational sayings that it has become nearly impossible to find fun and interesting feeds to follow without spending hours staring at your iPhone. So we did it for you.
This is not so much a “best of” list as a starting point that should open your mind to what else is out there in the great big Insta-world.
Emoji have gone from cute little pictograms only teens use, to a near-universal method of expression for all languages in about four years. Instagram has been tracking the use of emoji in posts and noticed an explosion of emoji after Apple added the keyboard to iOS in October 2011.
Today, nearly 60% of all Instagram posts in Finland use emoji, while users in countries like France, U.K., Russia, Italy and U.S.A. include emoji in 40% – 50% of posts. Using a tool called word2vec that reads through text and predicts the context around a given emoji, Instagram’s engineers have combed through millions of posts to decipher the true meaning of emoji.
Here are the most popular emoji and their definitions:
As Apple prepares to relaunch Beats Music at WWDC, another tech giant is throwing its name in the music ring: Instagram, which has just launched a new @Music account designed to capitalize on its popularity among music fans.
The newly-opened account will share music-related photos, lyrics, and videos, relating to both established artists and new acts you haven’t heard of.
Instagram continues to play with the color wheel, introducing three new filters Monday the company says get inspiration from weekend outdoor adventures.
In addition to the filters, named Lark, Reyes and Juno, Instagram now allows users to include emoji on hashtags.
Since surpassing more than 300 million users in December, Instagram has added several new features to the photo-sharing app. It added five filters in December and last month, rolled out a new app called Layout, which allows users to combine multiple images in a single post.
Catalin Marin should be walking around the streets of Dubai with a new iPhone – and not the one he dropped from a building 40 stories high.
Not only did Marin’s phone survive, it was rolling video the whole way down. When he got to his phone, he was able to watch it play back.
“I had a bit of a mishap this morning,” he wrote on her Instagram feed to introduce the 15-second video. “Shooting from the 40th floor, my phone decided to go for a ride into the wind. Forty floors down, not a scratch in sight.”
Instagram quietly enabled an option today that makes it super-easy to keep track of your favorite accounts.
You can now set up push notifications for whenever a specific account posts a new photo. The timing of the new feature makes perfect sense with the impending release of the Apple Watch.
Instagram has been inching towards being an all-in-one edit suite, and today the app took another small step in that direction.
What happens when a multi-billion-dollar social network steals your app’s name?
Independent developer Mike Swanson asked that question Monday when he learned that Instagram had released Layout, the Facebook-owned company’s new iPhone app for creating photo collages.
The Instagram faithful churns out 70 million photos daily. But if you weren’t able to share your meal or tell the story of your quirky cat in a single picture, you had to post multiple photos.
That changed Monday. Instagram introduced Layout, a new free app that lets you combine images into a single post. The news was announced on the Instagram blog.
Users can open Layout and drag and drop photos from their camera roll to any of the custom templates. Flip, rotate, resize and create mirror effects in your layouts.
Stephan Brusche was bored and starting to play with his food when he made a discovery that would change his life: Bananas are nice to draw on.
Graphic artists are paid to think this way, and Brusche was being urged by his wife to promote his work to a wider audience using Instagram.
“There wasn’t anything exciting to photograph,” said Brusche, 37, an artist for a travel agency in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “I still had a banana and I thought maybe if I draw a smiley face on it, that would make a nice picture. I discovered how nicely the ink flows on the peel. It was really a pleasant surface.”
That smiley face, posted more than three years ago, received more likes than his work illustrations. And thus Fruitdoodles was born. Since then, Brusche has transformed more than 200 bananas into fine art.
