Since being acquired by Facebook for close to a billion dollars all those months ago, it’s fair to say Instagram hasn’t changed a great deal. The tried-and-tested method of facilitating photos, filters, comments and likes hasn’t gotten any less popular as we approach the end of 2012, and today, Instagram has pushed out a couple of new features to keep Instafans happy-snapping.
The update affects those running on both iOS and Android, and although it’s fair to say the enhancements won’t set the world alight, they’ll certainly help improve the experience all-round.
First and foremost, the bread-and-butter camera functionality has been improved, with the iOS Camera Roll now integrating smoothly with the app. From what I gather, most users opt to upload and share images already taken as opposed to the trial-and-error method of shooting using the Instagram camera, and thanks to the new integration, selecting from your stored collection of images is a great deal more streamlined than it was before.
Instagram now also offers integration with Foursquare, with a dedicated button on location pages that’ll open up the app (or mobile web version), and give you further information of your current surroundings.
Instagram has well and truly popularized the filtering of images using a one-click process, and while this system has naturally come under some scrutiny from photography aficionados, it continues to be the staple part of the Instagram network. A vast portion of images uploaded to the Instagram servers are treated with some kind of hazy overlay, and for those whom cannot get enough of this strain of "editing", a new filter by the name of Willow has been added.
The tilt-shift blur feature has been improved, and now actually publishes the edit as you prepared. In earlier versions, discrepancies between the tilt-shift edits previewed and those eventually published made the feature a tad bit hit-and-miss, but with this latest release, everything appears to have been cleared up.
Both the iOS and Android versions are – as ever – free of charge, and can be downloaded below from the App Store and Play Store respectively.
(source Instagram)
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