You Don't Have To Go That Far

You might think you need an exotic destination far into the wilderness to get beyond the capabilities of Google's very capable maps. That is not always the case. I live six to seven hours south of Washington, DC, along North Carolina’s Southern Outer Banks near the town of Emerald Isle.

One trick to impressing your friends with a walk on the wild side is to find an area of beach that changes regularly. I learned this pretty much by accident.

When we moved to the coast seven years ago, I had visions of driving my pickup truck on the beach. One popular place is called the Point - the western tip of Bogue Banks Island in the town of Emerald Isle. Just after I bought my beach driving permit in the fall of 2007, the beach at the Point disappeared - as you can see from this picture. Acres of sand were covered by water.

A couple of years later, the sand started coming back. Today there is more than 1,450 feet of sand to the edge of the water. Google Maps, using annual aerial photographs, simply can't keep up.

Above is a current Google map of two of my hikes. The red line was a hike we took in August of 2012. The blue line was a hike in May of 2013. As you can see, either I know how to walk on water or the map isn't accurate.

Create Your Own Maps

Creating a map like this to impress with your friends is actually pretty simple.

First you need to get access to Google’s My Maps. The next requirement is a smartphone that works with an app that can communicate with Google’s My Maps. (Go to Customize and Share in Google Maps, and scroll down to My Maps for instructions on how to do this.)

My Tracks Is A Great Tool

Google’s My Tracks is one of the main reasons I use an Android smartphone. All you have to do is launch My Tracks when you go on a hike. Stop the track recording when you finish your hike and “Send to Google.” My Tracks will create a new map (It can do some other cool things, too, but that's a different post). To compare a second hike of the same area, just send both tracks to the same map.

You can even use My Tracks to create a map recording a series of hikes - I do this to creat my annual Emerald Isle beach survey. They're are a great way to show people that you have gone beyond the regular Google maps.

Maps, Albums & Photos

The next step, if you are willing to spend a little more time and enjoy digital photography you can create an album with your photographs mapped into it. Here's an album I created on a recent hike on the beach.

If your camera does GPS, all you have to do is upload the photos into something like Picasa Web Albums. I keep one of my Gmail accounts separate from my Google+ identity just so I can use the neat maps that show up in Picasa Web Albums.

If your camera isn't GPS-enabled, adding GPS data is actually pretty simple:

1. Synchronize the time on your smartphone and the time on your camera.
2. If you are using the My Tracks app, after you have sent your track to Google, do a “Save to External Storage.” Choose “Save as GPX.”
3. After it is saved, select the “Share track file” option and email it to yourself.

When I get back from the beach, I import all the photos into my computer and save the ones that I like to an album in Adobe's Lightroom 4, which just happens to have a mapping module. Next I download the GPX track file that I emailed to myself. I select all the photos in the album, choose the Lightroom 4 command “Load Tracklog” and then “Auto-Tag” the photos. Almost instantly all your photos pick up GPS information. Then I export the photos to a folder, load them into Picasa and send them to the Web and share the album with my amazed friends.

While it may sound complicated, it is actually pretty easy. And it creates some wonderful memories of places beyond the reach of most map services.

By analyzing over 1 million Instagram photos, self-described social media scientist Dan Zarrella found a strong correlation between hashtags and likes. The more you tag your photos, the more likely you are get a virtual hat tip from your fellow Instagrammers. 

(See also: Instagram Now Lets You Tag Friends, Brands and Selfies)

How Instagram Hashtags Work

As the contextual connective tissue that ties related images together, hashtags grease the wheels of photo discovery and get your pouty-faced mirror selfies and vintage-tinted lattes seen by more people. That exposure, in turn, results in more taps of the "like" button.

If you've ever taken the time to go back and tag your older photos, you've seen this in action: one after another, a parade of strangers will instantly start tapping the heart-shaped 'like' button under the image, sending a flood of virtual love your way. 

Of course, the results will vary depending on which hashtags are used. Super-popular tags like #love, #me, #cute and #instagood are naturally going to lead to more exposure, simply by virtue of the fact that those tags are popping up all over Instagram and a higher volume of people will wind up tapping on them. 

Driving Photo Discovery on Instagram

Along with geolocation tag pages, the pages for individual hashtags are one of the few areas of Instagram that let you break out of your own immediate network and peruse photos you wouldn't otherwise see. When you add a given hashtag to your photo, the image winds up on that tag's page, where it's seen by hordes of new people. Since most tags are at least somewhat descriptive, the images one finds by tapping on them are more contextually relevant than, say, the tween selfies and cat pics found on the app's Explore tab. That relevancy is what drives so many of those likes. 

Of course, like everything on the Internet, Instagram hashtags can be gamed for self-promotional purposes. Tags like #followforfollow, #like4like and #followback are used quite frequently as a sort of logrolling currency. If you like my photo, I'll like one of yours or better yet, I'll follow you.

Tactics like this might seem a little slimy, but they're incredibly effective, accordion Zarrella's data. The 11 top tags that garner the most likes seek some kind of reciprocal behavior. Nature-related tags like #sky #clouds #sunset and #nature are also highly correlated with frequent taps of the "like" button. 

See Also: 

• How To Get More Followers On Instagram
• Top 10 Most Popular Tags On Instagram
• When Is The Best Time To Post On Instagram?
• #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie

Indeed, there are now a ton of apps that let you manipulate images on your iPad with no shortage of vintage filters, quirky effects  and single-purpose gimmick apps. Those can be fun, but we wanted to focus on the super-popular, fully-featured editing apps that seem best to supplant desktop options for some users. 

Let's be honest. You're probably not going to walk around town holding up your iPad to take photos. If you do, we assure you that you'll look ridiculous doing it. It's also unnecessary. With syncing options like Photo Stream and Dropbox and the camera-connecting accessories available for iPad, you're free to snap photos on a more appropriate device and then access them on your iPad, where the editing experience keeps getting more and more delightful. 

5. Process 

To anybody who's accustomed to just about any digital photo editing software, Process will seem a bit unconventional. That's because the usual on-screen conventions for editing photos have been abandoned in favor of a system in which changes are made by adding "Processes" to the image. All the standard adjustments you'd likely make to an image – blur, brightness, contrast, curves, highlights, etc. – are each available as a preset called a Process, which once applied, can be adjusted manually. 

Process has its limitations. You can only apply edits, effects and filters to the entire image and can't drill down, use brushes or tweak individual details. It's not the most capable app out there, but it has an incredibly simple interface, making it a breeze for pretty much anyone to use. 

PROS: Super-simple UI, intuitive controls and commonly-needed adjustments.
CONS: Limited functionality. 
PRICE: $14.99 
Download From iTunes

4. Photo Forge 2

If you're looking for a more Photoshop-esque editing experience,  Photoforge 2 is a solid choice. It's popular among professional photographers who need a mobile solution for quick edits. In addition to all the typical photo adjustments like color balance, curves, contrast and the like, Photo Forge lets you add Instagram-style effects and simulate specific lenses, film types and processing techniques. Unlike most iOS photo editing apps, this one supports layers like those popularized by Photoshop on the desktop years ago. 

Photo Forge 2 is rather powerful, but all those features are packed into an interface that's anything but intimidating. It's a cleanly designed interface with intuitive controls. 

PROS: Feature-packed, supports layers, masking and high-res photographs. Upload photos via FTP. 
CONS:  Occasional performance issues reported by some users.
PRICE: $3.99
Download from iTunes

3. SnapSeed

Everybody loves SnapSeed. It has one of the highest ratings among photo apps in iTunes and constantly gets rave reviews. It's very good. Its super-simplified interface and grid of common adjustment options is reminiscent of Process, but with far more capability and granularity packed into each option. 

SnapSeed's touch gesture-based functionality takes full advantage of the iPad's form factor, desktop editing conventions be damned. Swipe your finger up and down to select the type of adjustment you want to make, then slide across the image to the left or right to tweak its intensity. You can even make selective adjustments that target only one part of the photo and blend it seamlessly with the rest of the image. Stuff like this can get pretty tedious to try and pull off in Photoshop. 

Like Process, SnapSeed doesn't give you total control, but what it does give you is enough to generate some stunning images. 

PROS: Intuitive, touch-based editing, selective adjustments and no price tag.
CONS: Not a fully-featured photo-editing app. It has its limitations. 
PRICE: Free
Download from iTunes

2. Adobe Photoshop Touch 

For awhile there, it looked like Adobe had given up on mobile photo editing, as app after app one-upped its underwhelming Photoshop Express app. Then it launched Photoshop Touch. 

Photoshop Touch brings many of the desktop's apps most useful features to a more minimalist, easy-to-learn interface on the iPad. It's no CS6, but Photoshop Touch supports such desktop staples as layers, the magic wand tool, the paint brush, clone stamp, text, gradients and a range of filters. That's all in addition to standard stuff like saturation, brightness/contrast, color balance and noise reduction. 

Realizing how unlikely you are to hold up your iPad to take photos like a goofball, Adobe went beyond the device's local Camera Roll and integrated Photoshop Touch with Google Image Search, Facebook and its own Creative Cloud.  

PROS: Familiar Photoshop interface, but more simplified and intuitive. Integration with Facebook and other photo sources. Built-in tutorials. 
CONS: Typography options could be better. FTP export would be a plus for pros. 
PRICE: $9.99
Download from iTunes

1. Photogene 

Photogene is another app that often gets a nod from professional photographers. It's easy to see why. Like Photoshop Touch and Photo Forge, Photogene is a feature-packed app that supports the kind of workflow that pros need to tone, resize and adjust their photos. And again, like those apps, it's easy to use and reasonably priced. 

Of all the pro-level iPad photo-editing apps, Photogene seems to have packed the most options in. Unlike Photoshop Touch, Photogene doesn't support layers or making granular selections within an image, but it more than makes up for those shortcomings with a huge selection of manual and preset editing options. You can do the one-size-fits-all Instagram-style filter or make modifications manually.  Photogene lets you FTP images to a server, which will allow it to fit into the workflow of pros on the go. 

PROS: A wide range of adjustments, filters, effects, presets and  export options, including FTP. 
CONS: No layers 
PRICE: $2.99
Download from iTunes

Other Noteworthy Options 

There are plenty of other options. Apple's iPhoto and Aviary's iPad app (which is free) both deserve serious consideration by anybody who wants to edit photos on their tablet. Luminance and Gridditor are worthy of the hype they've received recently as well. 

Which iPad photo-editing app is best for you? It depends on how serious of a photographer you are, how much control you want, and how much you're willing to pay for an app.  Photogene, Photoshop Touch and Photo Forge 2 are good enough to work for pros (most of whom will undoubtedly still turn to the desktop for serious editing needs), but all of the above options are accessible enough to be used by beginners.

Lead photo by Flickr user nayukim. 

The photo has come a long way. From the camera obscura of French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1822 to the daguerreotype from Louis Daguerre in 1837, the “Brownie” camera around 1900 and later the invention of the Polaroid in 1947. Photo quality has increased as cameras have become cheaper and more widespread. One of the first camera phones came from Kyrocera in 1999 and by the mid-2000s, almost every flip phone on the planet had a decent camera attached to it.

How Smartphones Changed Photography

The smartphone has caused another paradigm shift for photography. Not only can the masses take lots of pictures, they can take good pictures - and look at them as well - right on their mobile devices. Before smartphones, many people actually used to print their photographs.

The rise of Apple’s iPhone can correlated to its attention to detail in its camera hardware and software approach. Samsung’s BlackJack released in 2006 had a decent camera (even if it was running Windows Mobile CE). Nokia has recently made camera quality a priority with its PureView camera phone and features like Carl-Zeiss optics in its Lumia series.

What The Hell Is An "Ultrapixel?"

Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC wants to remind people that it has also been on the forefront of camera technology. In the infographic below, HTC outlines the history of the camera and its own contribution to the Mobile Revolution. The HTC Incredible was one of the first smartphones with an 8-megapixel camera. 

HTC thinks it is on the cusp of the next great iteration of smartphone photo technology. Its newest smartphone, rumored to be called the M7 and scheduled to be announced on February 19th in New York, is said to have a “4-ultrapixel” camera with an entirely new photo experience. What the heck is a 4-ultrapixel camera? Who knows. I will be on hand for HTC’s announcement later this month and will be sure to figure out if the manufacturer’s claims hold any water.

Check out the infographic from HTC below. Do you buy a smartphone based on its camera capabilities? Let us know in the comments.

No, Instagram is on the web now. It's a full blown web-based social network with a companion app. Forgive me while I totally freak out for a minute over here.

This is what I've been afraid of. 

For Instagram, The Rules Were Different

Instagram is special. It's why we Instagram acolytes almost start a holy war every time Facebook so much as looks at its billion-dollar acquisition. But what makes Instagram so different? The app has a lot going for it, sure. The interface is lovely, with both social networking and social discovery built right in. But that's not it.

The thing that makes Instagram special is that - until today - it was a social network with no web presence. There's an inestimable charm to how Instagram feels walled-off in its mobile-only realm.  You just don't interact with Instagram on desktop. The rules are different. It's like when the power goes out and you have to play board games. And it's really, really fun. 

Mobile-Only: The Final Frontier Of Play

Look at how (and why) we love to hate Facebook. As a social network, Facebook is woven into the fabric of our workday lives - namely we use it on on our desktop computers when we're supposed to be doing something else entirely. That fact makes a site like Facebook feel less like play and more like a professional tic. A social network with a ubiquitous presence across platforms becomes something we shove into every micromoment of the workday - and most of those happen while we're zoning out sitting at a desk.

Instagram wasn't like that - it was serendipitous and social and creative in turns. But that may have all just changed. Now, in every inbox lull and pre-meeting chunk of lagtime, we'll open a new tab and feel the tug - why not just check Instagram? 

The Unbearable Lightness Of Instagram

There's a heaviness to all of this attentional straying. It's the dopamine surge that lures us back to places like the Facebook News Feed, even though we know that little pleasure spike in our brain is as empty as it is ephemeral. Then we're back to the unshakeable guilt of what we were abandoned when we wandered off the trail. 

Mobile is monomaniacal — even with Android's multitasking and iOS's relatively nascent notification center and fast app switching, we pick a portal and enter into it. But on a computer, we partition our screen off into hostile factions warring for our attention - and we never seem to be on the winning side. But on mobile, choosing to open Instagram is just that: a choice and not a tic. 

Instagram is meant to be us at play, capturing the world and parceling it back out to our friends who are out there doing just the same. For Instagram, mobile is more than just a platform. It's a mindset.

Sure, Instagram's web feed will boost engagement and provide new opportunities for monetization and so on. But it could prove to be a major paradigm shift for the kind of unconditional positive regard that the company has enjoyed to date. 

We'll soon be wallowing in our newly compounded web ennui, scrolling back through our web feeds to remember what the good ol' days were like, way back when Instagram was still fun. 

Remember?

That is, until you take a step back and look around

As it turns out, Instagram is a breeding ground for many people's most narcissistic tendencies. It's a reality that comes into sharp focus as soon as you step outside of your circle of friends and look at what everybody else is posting. Turns out that as a group, Instagrammers are a pretty self-absorbed bunch. 

Sure, you might say, we knew this. Mirror-shot, pouty-faced self portraits of teenagers find their way to the "Popular" (now called "Explore") tab as often as sunsets, celebs and food pics. But Instagram narcissism is more than a stereotype. There's actually data to back it up. 

90 Million Selfies... And Counting

Consider this: The third most frequently used hashtag on Instagram is #me. Under it, you'll find more than 90 million self-portraits taken primarily by younger users, very few of them with any irony, or even much creativity. 

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with publishing self portraits. After all, your appearance is very significant part of the life you're documenting using social services like Instagram. Taken tastefully and periodically, the "selfie" can add personality and context to your never-ending streams of lattes, power lines, cats and skylines. And sure, just like in the real world, our brains love the ego boost we get from the compliments. 

Scrolling through the #me photos, you see images of varying quality, all displaying faces of different people. In a way, it's kind of fascinating to peruse. Here are all these people, broadcasting their own faces to the world. In one photo, you'll see an American kid with his collar popped and earbuds in, probably shirking some school-related responsibility. In the next, there's a Saudi Arabian man dressed in a traditional gutra headdress, snapping a self-portrait in the mirror. Some people have new haircuts. Some have new babies. One guy has several large nuggets of marijuana.  

Some of these images feel a little too intimate. As you scroll through, you start to get the feeling that you're peeking through a window of a world you're not quite supposed to have access to. But mobile and social technology have given us millions of little windows into the worlds of others, so we keep scrolling.

The stream exposes nothing explicit, but it's peppered with what feels like far too many young, teenage girls laying in bed. Or 15-year-old boys standing shirtless in front of a mirror. Some of these kids are showing skin. Just about all of them - male and female alike - are seeking some kind of approval from their peers and the larger community, which thanks to the Internet, is now effectively infinite.

The Rise Of The Narcissistic Social Media Star

Some are getting the approval they're seeking in a big way. Michael Saba is a 15-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, whose Instagram photos often find their way to the app's Explore tab among teen pop stars, professional athletes and professional photographers. But despite his 45,000 followers and hordes of teenage fans, Saba is not a celebrity. He is, as his Instagram profile says, "just a kid who takes pictures." 

Saba's photo stream is comprised entirely of self-portraits, each one garnering between three and five thousand likes and hundreds of comments, mostly from adoring teenage girls who fawn over Saba with almost Bieber-esque intensity - and shower him in heart-shaped Emojis. The pictures are not particularly interesting or varied. It's just him, in similar-looking outfits, day after day. Sometimes in the mirror, sometimes making well-rehearsed "cute" faces directly into his phone's camera. Quite often, Saba poses with two other friends, also heartthrobs. Every photo is a massive hit. Meanwhile, he follows only one other user. 

In our weird new world, it's not uncommon for young people to achieve this new type of psuedo-fame, fueled solely by social media. And we're not just talking the type of notoriety you can get from a viral YouTube video, which tends to require at least a sliver of talent, humor or skill. Instead, these kids are amassing huge followings just for being attractive. It's like a high school popularity contest on digital steroids, but this homeroom has more than 45,000 kids in it. 

Instagram And Self Image: Is The Impact Good Or Bad? 

Is this necessarily a bad thing? One has to wonder what this kind of existence must do to the ego of a 15-year-old kid. Or the weird new social dynamics it could produce at school. But some psychologists think that the self-image boosts offered by social networks like Instagram could be a good thing. 

It used to be that most of the photographs of other people we encountered were carefully crafted images of the flawless-looking individuals portrayed in popular media and advertising. Psychologists have long had concerns about the distorted effect that's had on normal-looking people's self images. Instagram and mobile photography more generally may be changing that. 

"I like to think that Instagram offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face each day," writes Sarah J. Gervais in Psychology Today. "Rather than being bombarded with those creations… we can look through our Instagram feed and see images of real people – with beautiful diversity." 

Of course, as Gervais acknowledges, there hasn't yet been much research into what sort of impact Instagram in particular is having on self image or anything else. Indeed, when I reached out to Microsoft's Danah Boyd and several other academics who study social media and its affect on society, I wasn't able to turn up much. 

The psychological impact of technology more generally has been a popular topic for a few years now. Narcissistic personality disorder has been on the rise for 20 years, according to a paper coauthored by Dr. Larry Rosen, who also wrote a book called iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold On Us. 

Some research suggests a correlation between social media and narcissism, but the condition's increase long predates the rise of smartphones, says Jean Twenge, a researcher at San Diego State University who studies issues related to social media.  

"It's probably both that higher narcissism causes people to use social media in narcissistic ways, and that some social media causes higher narcissism," says Twenge. "But it's definitely a two-way street."

As with other social platforms, tags are used on Instagram for descriptive purposes, typically appending a caption with words that are relevant to the image's content. Look, my cat is swatting at a turkey sandwich. #cat #cute #sandwich #slap #food #lol. Pretty standard stuff, right? 

See Also: #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie

Instagram hashtags can also be surprisingly effective in fueling content discovery, helping users get more exposure for the photos they take. Tagging images with the right terms at the right time can also lead to an uptick of likes and new followers. 

So what are the most popular tags?

It changes over time, and it can actually be interesting to watch trends spike and then fall out of favor on Instagram. In June, #tweegram was the third most-popular tag, but has since slid down the list to number 16. #summer is no longer in the top 10, for obvious reasons. The hashtag #me has grown more popular in the last seven months, suggesting that Instagrammers may be getting even more narcissistic than they already were. 

While some tags fluctuate, others remain popular over time. Tags like #love and #cute are among the most frequently used, while people evidently haven't gotten sick of tagging things with #photooftheday. 

If you were expecting #cats, #powerlines or #food to break the top ten, you may be in for a surprise. 

10. #girl

Photo by fashionstyleparison. 

9. #picoftheday

Photo by krad1469 

8. #beautiful

Photo by emmafudd72.

7. #instamood

Photo by mordyisrael. 

6. #photooftheday

Photo by tomwebstax.

5. #tbt  (Throwback Thursday)

Photo by justlikenonna. 

4. #cute

Photo by snoreborewhoree. 

3. #me

Photo by jonasbarcellos.

2. #instagood

Photo by wait4it.

1. #love

Photo by koolmello.

Polaroid's (awkwardly-named) "Fotobars" will be manned by (yet-more-awkwardly-named) "Fototenders" who can presumably help you edit, crop, and tinker with your digital creations to your heart's content. The stores look ripped right out of Apple's retail playbook, right down to the sparse white countertops at the Genius Bar... er, Fotobar.

Look familiar?

The catch? Unlike the camera that made Polaroid a household name, you won't have your photos instantly - in fact, you'll be waiting up to a few days. According to Polaroid, "All products created by consumers at Polaroid Fotobar retail stores... are handcrafted and shipped from the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility within 72 hours." 

The Polaroid camera, invented by the company's co-founder Edwin Land, first went on sale in 1948. He reportedly dreamt up the notion of an instant camera in 1944 after his daughter famously asked "Why can't I see the picture now?" after her father snapped a portrait of the three-year-old with his twin lens Rolleiflex.

Our thoughts exactly. 

Photo courtesy of Alexander Norman via Flickr

In response to a tidal wave of backlash among users, Instagram has rolled back the portion of its new Terms of Service agreement that pertains to advertising. Instagram users seized on the section's language, interpreting it to mean that the company would leverage user photos in future ad partnerships.

In a blog post Thursday night, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom clarified the issue in plain language: "Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do."  

Then, in a new blog entry perhaps designed to change the subject, Instagram announced an update to its just-updated Android and iOS app that makes a number of minor improvements and adds a brand new filter - Mayfair.

More on that later - the big question is whether the ToS backtrack means Instagram is really out of the woods?

Meet The New Boss (Same As The Old Boss)

Instagram's new policy around advertising is its old policy, which has been in effect since October 2010. The proposed language, which prompted the backlash, is as follows: 

"Some of the Service is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Service or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you. You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such."

The original/reinstated policy is this: 

The service's recent terms-of-service update trouble me greatly, but it's not quite a deal-killer for me as an amateur photographer. Plus, I'm hopeful that, after today's massive backlash, the company will rethink the wording of its new policy. If not, Instagram is about to get noticeably crappier. 

Under the new policy, Instagram is free to license photos to third parties without paying the users who created them. The shift paves the way for Facebook to get a return on its huge investment by monetizing Instagram. That's something the company has every right to do, but how it's going about the process - and the degree to which it appears to infringe on users' intellectual property rights - has sparked an enormous backlash and a deluge of "I quit!" rage tweets (see ReadWrite's Jon Mitchell on Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr). Even Anderson Cooper is pissed. 

When Facebook bought Instagram last year, everybody worried that the giant social network would ruin the photo sharing service. I thought that was an overreaction. Maybe I was wrong. If Instagram doesn't reverse course, this move could water down the experience - and hurt Instagram's growth and engagement metrics. 

Are millions of people really going to quit Instagram? Probably not. The service's absurdly rapid growth might slow down a bit, but those trend lines will keep heading north.

Instagram Hinges On Quality, Believe It Or Not

In response to today's news, lots of people are making the same joke: Do they really think they're going to make money from filtered photos of my lunch? LOL. Sure, there's a lot of garbage on Instagram (just as there is on Twitter and Tumbler), but there are also a lot of really high-quality, beautifully composed photographs. As social networks go, Instagram's user experience is uniquely hinged on the quality of the content published on it. The company knows this. Just look at the company blog. 

But even if 98% of Instagram users stay put, those who stick around will probably see a drop in the quality images. That's because the people most likely to jump ship are the people producing the best content: serious photographers.  

And who can blame them? People who make a living taking photographs already face a daunting landscape in the age of Google Image Search and stock photography. Many photojournalists and other pros had trouble warming up to Instagram in the first place, assuaged only by its rapid rise and guarantee of a sizable audience. It's a great marketing tool for photographers, but ceases to be worth it once Instagram starts monetizing their work without compensating them. 

I use Instagram constantly. Its icon occupies one of four coveted slots on my iPhone's dock and I open it almost as much as I open Twitter, and certainly more than Facebook. I use it to take and share photos, but most of the time I spend with Instagram is spent looking at images. Of all the photos I see everyday, most of my favorite ones come from people whose job it is to see, frame and snap good photos. Yes, tools like Instagram democratize photography and amateurs can produce some amazing work. But the most jaw-dropping things I see on Instagram come from newspaper photographers, documentarians and other pros. 

Neal Santos is an unbelievably good photographer. The Philadelphia-based photojournalist recently landed on Instagram's suggested user list, leading to thousands of new followers. Today, he has more than 18,000 Instagram followers, which is a promotional goldmine for somebody who makes images for a living. But Santos is now considering deleting his account.

"It's crazy to me how their blog features stunning photographs from professionals and artists who take time and put out high quality content," says Santos. "Their featured users list always has incredible working photographers listed."

It's precisely those hard-working, high-quality content-producing users - such as Santos himself - that Instagram stands to lose as a result of this change.

If that happens, everyone on Instagram is going to see a lot less of the "beautiful, original content" that Instagram is supposedly all about. The amateur food porn, on the other hand, will keep coming. 

UPDATE: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom responded to the outcry by attempting to clarify the company's intended approach to advertising ("We do not have plans" to use photos in advertisements) the selling of photos ("It is not our intention to sell your photos") and intellectual property ("Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.") Systrom says they plan on updating the language of their terms to better reflect this. It remains to be seen if Instagram's first Facebook-style policy change freakout will have any impact on their usage. 

Filters are the supposed key ingredient in Instagram’s wildly successful recipe, but for companies like Flickr, obsessing over them is missing the other important lessons of the $1 billion app. 

Yahoo's Best-Loved Product

Flickr was perfectly poised to be the social photo sharing app when Yahoo fell asleep at the wheel back in 2005. Amazingly, in spite of its failure to evolve, Flickr has managed to hang in there, often losing users, but never hemorrhaging them. It remains Yahoo's best-loved product, one so nostalgia-inducing that a site begging Yahoo's new CEO to fix it went viral earlier this year. 

In this rare instance, Yahoo might be well-served to play up the Yahoo-ness of one of its products. The company should position its photo network as the perfect alternative for folks nervous about Instagram's ever-deepening Facebook ties. If Facebook ends up fumbling Instagram, whether through a poor branding choice or a privacy flare-up, Flickr could be right there to pick up the slack. 

Flickr's Slow Decline

Though its enthusiastic core remains, Flickr's traffic has been on a slow decline for some time now. Still, it's hard to tell exactly how poorly Flickr is doing. Yahoo reported that the site had 51 million registered members in June 2011 and hasn't publicly offered those numbers since.

The company reports that more than 8 billion photos have been uploaded to its database, after topping 7 billion in June. That metric is a little slippery, though. It obviously can't be compared to Instagram's 1 billion total photo uploads, since Flickr users often batch upload via the Web, while adding a photo to Instagram is a one-at-a-time manual/mobile process. 

The Anti-Instagram?

Flickr doesn't need to swipe Instagram's filters to assert itself as a social photo hub - it still is a social photo hub. And Flickr’s mobile strategy is way too late to stave off the other app's rise. But Flickr isn't anything like Instagram, and it doesn’t need to be. Still, Yahoo's tarnished crown jewel could learn a thing or two from the app that stole its thunder. 

First of all, Like Reddit or any other social site with a rabid fan base, Flickr can intimidate new users. As a member who was late to the game, joining Flickr in 2009 or so, the site's network, menus and features can seem prohibitively complicated. Its thriving, enthusiastic communities are great, but they seem so well established that I never really knew where to get started. After signing up, I felt like the new kid in the cafeteria. Sure I sat down, plunking a few hundred photos in my feed, but I never felt at home.

A Delicate Balance Of Old And New

To attract new users, Flickr needs to create an inviting environment for beginners without alienating its long-time members - no easy task. The new mobile app is a great step in that direction, with a robust set of sharing and editing features that could please old and new users alike.

The core Web experience needs its (many) cobwebs dusted off too. Unlike simple, single-purpose Instagram, Flickr is glutted with features, from EXIF data to bustling communities and tags as far as the eye can see. It can't just dump that stuff, but it should make note of the sparse elegance that makes Instagram thrive. Instagram does one thing very, very well - Flickr needs to figure out what its thing is and make that very clear to everyone. 

Less Is More

Flickr announced a preliminary redesign on Wednesday, but the site needs a lot more work than a new navigation bar. Getting around on Flickr is clunky at best: useful features are buried in labyrinthine nested menus. Last year, one of Flickr's own designers even published a scathing critique of how the site's design could be yet another nail in its coffin. In a now-removed blog post, designer Timoni West took "the most important page on Flickr" to task: 

"The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.

The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back."

Not A Zero-Sum Game

As social networks obsessively imitate one another, they risk diluting the uniqueness that makes them relevant in the first place. Sure, Flickr thew photo filters into the mix to cover its bases. But if you’re Flickr, you’ve already got a community built around doing photographic things that don’t involve applying special effects to little square photos. 

If Instagram is for anyone with a smartphone camera, Flickr is for photographers. Thanks to the rise of Instagram, that distinction is blurrier than ever - and Flickr can leverage the surge of interest in social photo sharing if it plays its cards right. Instagram is the gateway drug of social photography. Now that it has an excellent mobile app at its disposal, Flickr feels like the real stuff.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr's blog.

Just as important, we have ubiquitous new ways to view and share all those photos, from mobile phones to tablets to computers of all sorts. With how radically technology has upended the way we take and share photographs, you'd think that printing images would be dead by now.

Far from it. As it turns out, the act of preserving our favorite images in the analog world is becoming newly meaningful.

The Internet and computers of all shapes and sizes have made producing and consuming content easier than ever. We're awash in more information, news, opinions, artwork, photographs, videos and songs than our brains know what to do with. It's overwhelming. Ironically, choosing to pull the best or most meaningful bits out of this endless digital river as it rages by and solidifying them in a physical format, means more now that it did when all content was analog.

Today, analog isn't just hip. It's relaxing. Putting on a vinyl record is an altogether different experience from shuffling a Spotify playlist, just as cozying up with a paperback book can help us feel more focused than reading on an iPad. Likewise, tapping the "Like" button on a Facebook photo means one thing. Hanging it on your wall or refrigerator is quite another. Even better, turn your favorite photos into a book. 

Turn Your Instagrams Into... Pretty Much Anything

Look at Instagram. As the social photo app has exploded into the mainstream - hitting 100 million users more quickly than either Facebook or Twitter did - there's been a corresponding rise in third-party services designed to let people turn Instagram photos into physical artifacts. 

Sure, you could easily upload photos from Instagram or any other mobile source to one of the many standard photo-printing sites, but this new breed of Instagram-specific services streamlines the process by letting you authenticate with your Instagram account and pull photos directly from your own stream. With many of them, you can just select images and place an order from your phone. 

It's ideal for making the sort of glossy photographic prints we've always cherished, but people are turning to these services for much more than that. Printstagram sells Instagram prints, posters, photo books and calendars. Art Flakes has stickers. Want magnets? Try StickyGram. If you used Instagram to snap photos on vacation, Postagram will turn them into postcards. CanvasPop will print your photos on high-quality canvas. And the list goes on. 

Meanwhile, printing photos from Facebook and Instagram is now a standard feature on kiosks at places like Walgreens and Target. Long gone are the days where we dropped off a roll of 24 mystery pictures, waited an hour (or a week) and then shuffled through a stack of mediocre shots to see if there were any gems mixed in. 

Today, printing is a much more deliberate act, reserved for only the images we appreciate the most. The rest of them will sit on hard drives and Facebook Timelines to be scrolled through at our leisure. Many of them, of course, will never get looked at by anyone. The ones you take the time and trouble to print, though, those are the ones you're gonna make sure everyone sees.

If there was a watershed moment in Instagram's rise to mainstream legitimacy, it was the arrival of Hurricane Sandy last week. As the superstorm wreaked havoc upon New York and New Jersey, Instagram saw a record-breaking ten photos posted every second. Before long, more than 800,000 images were tagged #sandy, leading to what CEO Kevin Systrom called "the single largest event taking place that was captured on Instagram.” 

Instagram's Twitter Moment

It wasn't just the sheer volume of Sandy photos that made this significant. For the first time, the mobile photo-sharing service was being used and talked about during a major news event - the same way Twitter has been for years. Twitter and Facebook remained every bit as chatty as they've tended to be during events like this. But the uniquely visual nature of Instagram lent itself perfectly to a news event that was all about images - from flooded city streets and ransacked store shelves to the eerily dark Manhattan skyline. 

For the most part, these image were authentic, even if some were mis-tagged and off-topic. Perhaps because it's so closely tied to the functionality of actual cameras, Instagram was less of a breeding ground for deceitfully Photoshopped images than social networks that exist on the desktop first. It was still entirely possible to get fake photos onto Instagram, but not as effortlessly as they could be posted to Twitter or Facebook.

Instagramming The Election

Election day was another watershed moment for Instagram. As Americans headed to the polls to get their free "I Voted" stickers, many were whipping out their smartphones and documenting everything from long lines to their own ballot (which may or may not be legal). 

The last time we had a presidential election in the United States, the iPhone was a year old, Android was brand new and there was no such thing as an iPad. Instagram was still two years away from being launched. How things have changed in four years. 

For its Instagramming the Election feature The New York Times is using the Storify interface to display hand-curated, user-generated images tagged with #NYTelection. That the nation's 161-year-old newspaper of record is utilizing a 2-year-old social network to solicit reader-submitted photography is a testament not just to Instagram's explosive growth, but to its rapid rise to legitimacy. When the app first landed in the App Store, it was something many professional photographers frowned upon. 

That began to change only within the last year or so. At the Online News Association (ONA) conference in September, educator and popular Instagrammer Richard Koci Hernandez led a panel about how media organizations can use Instagram, trying his best to explode the myth that doing so was somehow "cheating." His audience was mostly receptive, but not everybody at ONA was sold on Instagram as a tool for news publishers.

Across the industry, it's still something media outlets are figuring out what to do with, and the payoff is not immediately clear. Still, with more than 100 million users and its prominence in two recent historic events, Instagram is now officially impossible to ignore.  

Instagram has been moving toward Web app territory for several months, but this is the service's biggest step in that direction. In July, the Instagram added the ability to like and comment on photos from the Web version that gets pushed out via Twitter and Facebook. That update also included the ability to follow users when logged into your existing Instagram account in a Web browser. Creating such an account, however, remained a mobile-only feature. 

How Instagram Users Will Benefit 

Starting this week, users will start getting Facebook Timeline-style profiles that display their entire photo stream in the browser. This is a big deal. As popular as Instagram is on iOS and Android, it remains an island of content that exists largely outside of the open Web. 

Making these photos navigable from the Web gives a more complete identity to Instagram users whose photos are being encountered by browser-bound visitors. Previously, all they could see on the Web was one photo, feedback from other users and a tiny avatar identifying the user who took the photo. Now they can browse other photos, interact with them and get a clearer understanding of the photographer and whether or not they'd like to follow them. This important context was missing before. Active Instagrammers should expect to see more trickle-down engagement across their photo stream when they post photos to Web-based social networks. 

There's Still A Wall Between Mobile And Web 

While this substantial Instragram update addresses a long-standing user demand, it's still incremental. You can't click through and view a user's followers or see who they're following, for instance. This limits Web-based Instagram users' ability to discover new people to follow. That's still that happens exclusively from the mobile app, and even there it's still disappointingly limited. 

Photo Maps didn't make their way into the new Instagram Web interface either. The new location-based layouts that launched in August turn out to be a very good thing for photo discovery on mobile devices, but curious Web users will have to wait to see them on bigger screens. That's too bad.