My InstaAlbum
Version 1.02
Price: $1.99
Bottom Line: A little pricey for what it does, but a good utility for serious Instagrammers.
There is a growing ecosystem of iPhone photo apps based on enhancing the functionality of Instagram. My InstaAlbum is a fairly new app that allows you to maneuver through your Instagram account more easily than the Instagram app itself. It allows to “save Instagram Photos & share”, but it also has some other cool extras over and above what the Instagram app offers.
My InstaAlbum has an easy to use, straightforward interface. The app opens in album view showing your photostream by month. Images are shown three across on an iPhone – slightly larger and giving them more visibility than Instagram’s four-across album view. My InstaAlbum also lets you view your photo stream sorted by tags, location, or filter. The app has a lot of filters to help better sort through your photostream which is especially handy if you have a lot of photos on Instagram.
My InstaAlbum gives you the basic information about each photo in your stream – title, date taken, geo-tag, and filter info. It gives you some cool stats about your Instagram account and breaks down your photos by the filter used to process the photo – a pretty cool feature for stats geeks, and a feature that Instagram itself doesn’t offer. The map view is pretty cool with pins dropped where you’ve taken Instagram pics. Because it’s based on a Google map, you can zoom out as far as you want to see local, regional, and global views.
While My InstaAlbum lets you move around your Instagram photostream with ease, its strengths lie in its sharing abilities. Not only does it allow you to redownload an image to your camera roll (a feature found in the Instagram app), it is an easy uploader to Facebook, Twitter, DropBox, email and MMS. This expands on Instagram’s built-in sharing feature which currently is limited to just Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, the app doesn’t allow you to upload to Instagram. You can’t comment or view comments on your photos. And you can’t use My InstaAlbum’s tools to view the profiles and photostreams of other Instagrammers. Basically, it takes the social out of Instagram and you’ll still need to use another app for the social aspect of the site. Letting you browse other Instagrammers feeds with My InstaAlbum’s tools and stats would be a great addition to the app.
At $1.99, My InstaAlbum is a little pricey for what it does and may not be an essential Instagram purchase for everyone, but for serious Instagrammers, the stats and the sharing features definitely make it a utility worth considering.
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
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