Instagram for Android

Gene Goh, a good friend who is a great wedding and lifestyle photographer, is also an Android phone user. Like me, he has been waiting for the launch of Instagram on Android. This morning at 2am, it is finally live. Here's his brief note, published with his kind permission.


Visit his Facebook note here.

My Quick Take on Instagram for Android
by Gene Goh on Wednesday, 4 April 2012 at 09:33

Instagram for Android has just been released, and I'm beginning to see why this app has caused such a stir in the iPhone photography world.

This is a review on the Instagram app, and I will modify it as I find more features and find out more on working with this app. Do pardon me if I have made any wrong assumptions.

I've been using Vignette, a paid Android app, to process my photos and share them on Facebook. While Vignette has many customizable options to process your photos, it takes a while to choose which processing style you want. That has deterred me from processing my photos as it simply takes too much time to get my photos processed.

So far, what I'm impressed with Instagram are the following:

• Established Instagram social network
• Relatively fast startup time
• On the fly preview of effects
• Nice lomo/retro effects
• Elegant frames for images
• Option to import existing photos for processing
• Very easy-to-use interface
• Saves an original copy of the photo in the camera folder and saves the processed copy in the Instagram folder, useful for rework

What I think is lacking in Instagram:

• Restricted by square crop
• Somehow I am restricted to a resolution of 1536x1536 even though I have set my native camera to full 3264x2448
• According to engadget, Instagram has a max resolution of 2048px. After some tests, I found that Instagram resizes the image to 1224px if the camera is set to larger than 2048px on the shorter side. However, it does not resize the image if the camera is set to less than 2048px.
• Option to start in camera mode instead of showing Instagram feeds upon startup

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