Learning to love Instagram more

When I first heard about Instagram, the popular photo sharing app for the iPhone, I immediately wrote it off as redundant tech. “Why would I want an app that is part Flickr, part Twitter, part 4square and part Hipstamatic?” I wondered, “I already have all of those things!”. When I finally tried the app however, I was immediately addicted. In the same way I didn’t “get” twitter until you actually tried it, Instagram doesn’t make sense until you’ve played with it. Rather than combining existing services, Instagram fills a gap that you didn’t even know existed. If you are unfamiliar with it, Instagram allows see photos your friends are sharing, as well as uploading your own pictures. In a twist on Twitter’s functionality, Instagram asks “What are you seeing?”. Screenshots, self portraits, sunsets, empty BART cars, etc. All of the images are cropped into a 612 pxl square, then displayed in a timeline along with all of your other friends photos. You can add descriptions, locations, and filters if you like, but the basic idea is you are just sharing images that you find interesting, however mundane they may be. It’s a deceptively simple app, but it’s this simplicity that keeps that app great… like Twitter before they added all the recommended friends, retweets, and other complex behavior.


What I like most about Instagram is that it allows you to find and share beauty in everyday things. Typically, I’m not finding myself drawn into the high res images of cityscapes as much as an iPhone shot that perfectly captures some interesting crack on the sidewalk… or pic of some fresh made biscuits in the oven that a friend posted along with a recipe. It’s finding beauty in the mundane, which I love, and since I’ve started using Instagram I’ve been taking more pictures than ever before!


The biggest downside to Instagram is that it only exists as an iPhone app. So my friends can’t subscribe via RSS to view on their browsers or on their Android devices… so as a work around, I created a Tumblr (ick!) page that will have all of my Instagram pictures available as I post them. You can grab the rss feed for my Instumblrgram pics here. It’s not an ideal system, but it gets the job done and some of my friends are also trying the same thing.


With the help of my fantastic webmaster Naomi, I’ve also added a new feature to DocPop.org‘s web-banner. Anytime you visit the site, you can see my most recent Instagram picture “paper-clipped” to the top right hand side of the page. Isn’t’ that awesome? As a bonus, you can still see a different banner image every time you refresh the page (I have 12 in rotation).

Posted

in

,

by

doc

Tags:

, , , , , , ,

Comments

7 responses to “Learning to love Instagram more”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Except when Tumblr’s RSS feed is down… 🙁

  2. Nicole Aptekar Avatar
    Nicole Aptekar

    I did the same thing with my instagramstream, making http://nicolehasfingerprints.tumblr.com/

    Thanks for the writing! It echoes what I love about it really nicely.

  3. doc Avatar
    doc

    Yeah, Tumblr is down a bunch, but I think this issue was unrelated. Whatever it was, it’s been all fixified by Naomi now.

  4. DocPop Avatar
    DocPop

    Yeah, Tumblr is down a bunch, but I think this issue was unrelated. Whatever it was, it’s been all fixified by Naomi now.

  5. How to automagically post IG images into your WP theme – DocPop.org

    […] few months ago, my friend Naomi helped add a new feature to my site which automagically displays my most recent Instagram photo onto my WordPress theme. In case you missed it, or are reading on RSS, it’s the […]

  6. allissilla Avatar
    allissilla

    Is it possible to get already posted pictures from instagram to tumblr?

    Or what I actually want to have is a blog with all my instagram pictures posting automatically. Do you know if there’s a wp template that does that? I’d like to share my photos like webstagram basically but without the logging in to be able to see my photos. Or is it the lack of rss feed that prohibits this?

    Thanks for lovely instagram photos btw!

  7. Doctor Popular Avatar
    Doctor Popular

     Howdy, I don’t know much about Tumblr, but there might be some way to import all of your images over. That’s a good question for sure. I was checking in the wp plugins page recently and saw a ton of IG related plugins there.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *