If you're a Flickr user, you may want to dig through that bulk inbox for an important heads-up from the photo sharing site. Reports have emerged that between Jan. 18 and Feb. 7, a portion of Flickr users' private photos were made public due to a software bug discovered during routine maintenance. While the photos wouldn't have shown up in a search, they were visible on affected users' photo streams during that time. 

Scope Of The Breach Remains Unclear

Rather than reporting this on its company-wide blog, Flickr opted to selectively notify individuals affected by the mishap. The company has only admitted that the issue impacted a "small percentage of photos," so the scope of the privacy breach remains unclear for the time being. For compromised accounts, the bug only exposed photos uploaded between April and December 2012. 

To mitigate further damage, Flickr locked down affected users' photos with additional privacy settings, requiring some users to manually re-adjust the privacy settings on their entire Flickr photo collections - no small task for a longtime user.

Between a slick new iPhone app and a lot of Instagram malaise, Flickr got a major shot in the arm late last year. We don't yet know how many users were affected, but it's certainly triggered a wave of negative sentiment for the Yahoo-owned photo site.

If you had any relatively naughty Flickr activity last year, now's the time to go through your privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb.

The Instagram hashtag can be a pretty powerful thing. 

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.

One morning this week, at 4:25am Eastern time, I got an email from Amazon:

“Great news! You can now enjoy photos on your Kindle Fire using the Cloud Drive Photos app. Store your photos online and have them at your fingertips on your Fire.”

I had to laugh.

I Was Late To The Party

My first thought was "better late than never." Then I noticed the software had been released back in November, so the joke was actually on me.

Still, Amazon taking a year to release a decent cloud-based photo app had sent me right into the arms of a Nexus 7.

The Kindle Fire I got for my Christmas 2011 gift had been my first adventure into tablets. (I’m hooked on photos - which you might know if you read my post on Photo Finishing Your Memories Old and New.)

As an Android user (see Seniors Should Be Dialing In On Smartphones), I was expecting an App on the Kindle Fire like the “Gallery App” on my LG Spectrum smartphone. After all Amazon is an expert with the cloud so it should know how to store my JPEGs. There was no cloud photo app at the time.

Amazon Cloud Drive Couldn't Figure Out Photos

So I experimented by putting some images on my Amazon Cloud Drive. My Kindle and/or Amazon didn’t seem to know what to do with them. Inevitably when viewing the photos, some were always oriented wrong. Often it was the ones that I really wanted to show.

This was surprising, since Amazon seemed to know exactly what to do with my Word documents. It turned them into books that I could easily page through on my Kindle Fire.

Portfolio: A Third-Party Alternative

It wasn’t long before I discovered Portfolio, a neat $2.99 app for Android that worked with Microsoft’s Sky Drive among other things.

I didn’t really care whose cloud had my photos, I just wanted to show a few images using my Kindle Fire when I visited with friends. Portfolio worked really well for me. Just dropping the photos in a folder on my SkyDrive automatically created a slide show.

When I bought a Nexus 7 this holiday season, I was pleased to get my Gallery App back. Ease of access to my photos, more consistent sharing options and the speed of Chrome on the Nexus 7 relegated my Kindle Fire into a backup tablet that I keep in my upstairs office.

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Rocks

But when I got the note from Amazon this morning, I had to give its Photo Cloud a try. I installed it on my Windows 8 tower, Windows 7 laptop and my now famous Mac Mini running Mountain Lion. Installation was simple and it workeds well on all of them - although, annoyingly, it did install Java Runtime on the Mac.

Uploading photos is as easy as right clicking or dragging and dropping. Unfortunately there is no Linux client yet.

Just to put it to the test, I used the software on Windows 8 to put photos from my Google Drive on the Amazon Cloud. On Windows 7, I uploaded pictures via my Lenovo laptop from the shared media library of my wife’s Windows 7 laptop. I also uploaded photos from Dropbox and the desktop on the Mac to the Amazon cloud. There is a nice option in the Mac version to import from iPhoto. You access it from the cute cloud icon in your menu bar. It is easy to choose what you want to import.

The pictures all show up in a nice slide show on my Kindle Fire. The only challenge so far is that I cannot seem to find the original handful of pictures that I uploaded last year. Of course I might have copies in a few other places.

Nostalgia for Polaroid's iconic instant photos may have very well sparked the photo sharing craze that brought us Instagram, and now things have come full circle - sort of. Polaroid plans to launch 10 retail stores in 2013 that exist with the sole intent of printing your Instagram photos for you. You can print any kind of digital photo in the stores, of course, but Polaroid is mostly angling to tap into the boundless enthusiasm of the Instagram crowd. 

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

The New Year often reminds us of things we have meant to do all year. Many New Year's resolutions often fail, but setting one revolving around a digital solution can sometimes work its way into your routine with less pain than a daily trip to the health club. Organizing our family's photos is one of the things that became part of my routine after making a resolution a few years ago.

If your parents are still alive, you could be faced with shoe boxes full of old photos to add to your own collections. Such pictures might be important peeks into your family's history and are worth preserving. If you add to those boxes your own collection of pictures and the digital photos that are scattered over your various devices, you can be looking at a huge challenge.

The best solution is a routine that takes care of the present and starts nibbling away at the past. With a history of storing photos in the cloud for years, I have put a lot of thought into organizing and protecting our photos. Others might have different ideas, but this is what works for me.

My solutions are not operating-system specific. It will work on a Mac or a Windows machine, or you can accomplish the same thing with a computer running Linux.

I'm going to suggest that photos you are going to archive deserve to be cropped and adjusted before you save them. You will be surprised how pleased you will be in the future with your handiwork. There are a number of photo editing programs out there, but I've been using Picasa and iPhoto for years. Picasa is free and iPhoto still comes free if you buy a new Mac. Picasa is one of the first applications that I load on a new computer. I have even been running it on Windows 8 since early December 2012 without any problems. Picasa also runs on any Intel-based Mac. There are a number of Linux photo solutions though the one I prefer on my Ubuntu system is Shotwell Photo Manager.

Dealing With The Present

When working with present-day shots, I never let my photos age on the camera's memory cards. When I come in from my morning or evening walk, I immediately import my photos to my Windows laptop. A quick scan will usually reveal six or seven that I like. I mark them with Picasa's "star" tool, then crop and adjust the lighting and color. My goal is always to tune the image to look the way I remember the scene looking to my eye when I snapped the photo. If I wait even a few hours to do this, it is much harder to recall the setting for the picture.

Once I am happy with the photos, I export the starred ones to my Google Drive in the cloud. You could just as easily use DropBox or Microsoft's SkyDrive for this step. On Linux Google Drive is not officially working yet, so I would use DropBox. My photos go in a folder automatically given today's date. The next thing I do is "share" my edited photos to a chosen album in the cloud on my Picasa web album account. Basic Picasa web album accounts are free and tied to your Gmail address. Once in Picasa web albums, my chosen photos are already in the cloud at two different places.

Some reviews of photo archiving software complain that Google has made using Picasa for this purpose more difficult, given Google's effort to push sharing through Google+. There is a simple secret to solving this. I have two Gmail accounts and one of them is not tied to a Google+ identity. I use the one disconnected from the Google+ identity for photos because I can send my photos directly to Picasa web albums without having to first share through Google+. However, sharing a set of photos through Google+ does automatically creates a Picasa web album, so if you have no problems sharing in two places, you'll still get your Picasa album.

Typically, I also set up albums for special trips or events. I always have a bucket album which covers photos for a three month period like "Fall of 2012."

Google has made it very easy to add photos to your Picasa web albums even if you don't use the desktop application Picasa on your computer. Once you access one of your Picasa web albums via web browser, you can select the action "add photos" and then just select photos on your Google drive or computer and drag them to the browser window. Once the photos are on the web, it is easy to re-order them, add captions or even select the cover photo for the album. You can also share links with others to an individual photo or an album. If your photos have GIS information, you will also see that in Picasa web albums.

I go one step further with my photos. I carry the same photo memory card upstairs to my office and import the photos once again to iPhoto. Often seeing photos on a different computer screen with different software will have me choosing a few more that I want to keep. On the Mac it is easy enough to "flag" the photos that I like and have tuned up and then upload them to the same daily folder on my Google Drive. I then repeat the process of adding the additional photos to the cloud-based Picasa web album I have chosen. At the end of the process, I have my preferred photos in the cloud in two places, and on two different computers that are backed up regularly. Only then do I sometimes share general-interest photos on Facebook or Twitter, and special ones on Pinterest.

Photos taken on my smartphone get automatically uploaded to my DropBox account where it is easy to import them. It is also easy to share a photo taken by my smartphone using Bluetooth sharing to my Windows laptop.

Archiving The Past

For the last few years, I've been tackling boxes of photos, albums and slides from the past. I usually manage to find some down time in December to do that. Scanning photos is a good way to escape holiday insanity.

Last summer, as we were moving from our home of over twenty years, I actually finished up all the photos we've collected over the years. After I threw away photos that no one could identify or were of poor quality, I handed the boxes of photos and slides over to my oldest daughter to see if she wanted to comb through them one more time.

When tackling boxes of real prints and slides, I use an Epson Perfection V500 scanner. I chose it because the software works well on Macs and Windows computers and it was fast. I can scan each photo in less than a minute. Slides take a little more time, but because you can load a few slides at one time, it is not a lengthy process.

As I get a number of photos scanned, I will import them into iPhoto or Picasa and then move them into an album on Picasa web albums. I usually tempt the other family members to add their own by sending them a few photos or a link to the album of recently scanned photos.

I could have done the same thing on Flickr, but I find the sharing and privacy options a little more to my liking on Picasa web albums. My extra 25 GBs of Google storage costs me $2.49 per month. Even with my huge collection of photos and email, I have only used 41% of my storage.

Regardless of which services you use, or how you want to organize your photos, the important thing is to establish a pattern that will make your photo organization less of a chore and more of a part of your daily routine.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Web has spoken. And it wants your paws off of its little-square-filtered-photos, thank you very much.

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 holidays may have come early for Yahoo this year... assuming that the company is paying attention.

Just last week I noted that if Facebook makes a misstep with its biggest acquisition to date, Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service is perfectly positioned to welcome a mass exodus of Instagram users. That seems to be happening right now as an update to Instagram's Terms of Service has many Instagrammers up in arms.

See Jon Mitchell's Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr

See John Paul Titlow's Facebook Poisons Instagram For Its Most Valuable Users: Real Photographers

The text of the update, which appeared at the top of my Instagram feed on Monday, is available in full on Instagram's blog. Want the Cliff's Notes? Facebook will be pumping ads into Instagram and your photos are fair game:

"Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you. If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf."

The new Instagram terms go into effect January 16th. 

So what's the problem? People don't trust Facebook. In spite of inching toward transparency, the social network is so big (and so slippery, historically) that many members are suspicious of its motives. When Facebook bought Instagram last spring, the consensus was that the deal was an expensive way to neuter an emergent threat. But the boost to Facebook's Like-worthiness could have been just as valuable, assuming the social behemoth didn't fumble its biggest acquisition. 

Enter Instagram, an extremely well-loved app - especially considering its age. And for a while Facebook treated its shiny new toy with kid gloves. The company swore up and down that the beloved mobile-only service would maintain its autonomy from the world's biggest social network. Facebook tread carefully to avoid upsetting the big new brand under its wing.

Until this week, that is. 

If Facebook breaks Instagram, users won't hate only the implementation of ads and the monetization of their content without payment; they'll loathe the brand that made their favorite app un-fun. "Ugh, Facebook ruins everything," they'll huff about the new ToS.

Yahoo's Flickr Moment?

Hey, Yahoo... you're writing all of this down, right? It's go-time if you want to take advantage of the newly bubbling discontent with Instagram. But you've got to be pro-active.

Slash Flickr Pro membership prices, blast some sassy remarks across social channels... whatever it takes. You just launched a great mobile update. People want a photo sharing service they can trust - or maybe even just one that isn't bound up in Facebook. Instagram's wave of social photogs might be ready to flee the app for greener, more trustworthy pastures - and they're looking for a pied piper. Now is your chance to make sure Flickr is that place.

Ready to make the jump yourself? Services like Instaport and OpenPhoto let you download your Instagram photos in one fell swoop so you can batch upload them to Flickr. Godpseed!

Love applying moody effects to your iPhone photos? Well, you're in luck - after this week, you can do that on just about every image app you've ever downloaded. In the latest lap of the overwrought social media arms race, Twitter and Flickr have updated their mobile apps to offer photo filters, just like good ol' Instagram. 

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.

The New York Times is reporting that Twitter plans to update its mobile apps with Instagram-like photo filters in the coming months. The goal is to get Twitter users to bypass Instagram entirely, instead of sharing Instagram photos out to Twitter.

But if the plan is real, it's a waste of Twitter’s energy. And it’s yet another sad sign of Twitter walling itself off instead of collaborating.

What If Twitter Was The World's Best Instagram Client?

Instead, imagine if Twitter was the best Instagram client in the world. If people connected their Instagram and Twitter accounts, they would be able to easily follow all the same people in both places (which they already could before Twitter cut off the feature in July).

You could tweet a picture with a particular hashtag and push it to Instagram. Pictures shared from Instagram would be accessible and shareable everywhere, not just on smartphones, and favoriting or replying to an Instagram tweet would automatically push the Like and comment to Instagram. If Twitter was that good of an Instagram app, the competition would push Instagram to be even better, and we’d all gain from it.

But that’s not the world we live in. Instead, these social networks have built their businesses around boxing each other out. Facebook snatched up Instagram, a very smart and expensive move, and now Twitter has cut off Instagram’s access to the follow graph and may be going it alone with its own cheesy photo filters.

Facebook did not drop $715 million on Instagram because of the photo filters. It spent the cash to own the network of people on the service. Instagram’s graph of relationships is based on interests. Its users follow the people whose feeds interest them, whether they follow back or not. It’s a rich picture of what people like, and Facebook needs that. It also didn’t want Twitter to get it.

Facebook networks grow in slower, less dynamic ways because each friend request requires both people to approve. Twitter’s asymmetrical following model turned out to be its most important difference from Facebook. While Facebook’s social graph provides a clear picture of people’s real-world relationships, Twitter’s one-way subscribing model shows their interests.

Twitter Is Jealous Of Instagram

Instagram works like Twitter, but it’s visual instead of textual. People love it. They share their view of the world there, and like-minded people find their visions and appreciate them. Twitter’s getting jealous, and now it wants to replace Instagram.

But it will do so with inferior apps and an increasingly bizarre interface that wants to be all things to all people. With none of the intimacy of Instagram, Twitter’s copycat effort can’t help but be lame in comparison.

But hey, maybe the New York Times’ unnamed sources at Twitter will have a change of heart and learn to get along with their competitors. But based on how Twitter's been acting lately, this move makes perfect sense for them.

Photo by Jon Mitchell.

Social photo sharing is quickly finding its way into newsrooms. Even though the payoff might not be immediately clear, many media organizations are turning to Instagram as a place to experiment. (Part 1 of a 4-part series on how journalists are using social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter.)

Instagram's value to news organizations is less obvious than that of most other social networks. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can be used direct audience members to the publisher's site, but Instagram doesn't even encode URLs dropped in comment threads. There is no convenient opportunity to drive traffic directly to a media outlet's own site from within Instagram. So why bother?

See also: How Journalists Are Using Pinterest

For those willing to take an experimental plunge, Instagram is more about branding and engagement than eyeballs and dollars. After some campaign trail experimentation, the Associated Press is encouraging its staff photographers to use their personal Instagram feeds in a professional capacity. Meanwhile, well known media outlets like NPR and the Wall Street Journal maintain official accounts that share photos highlighting major news events. 

"We haven't totally figured out a strategy, to be honest," NPR Multimedia Producer Claire O'Neill said last week at the Online News Assocation (ONA) conference in San Francisco. Whatever they're doing, it seems to be working. The organization's Instagram account boasts over 213,000 followers with each image sparking hundreds of comments and thousands of likes. NPR recognizes that Instagram isn't going to drive increases in the traditionally sought-after metrics, but is happy to experiment where millions of users are waiting.    

By contrast, Yahoo! News is holding off on diving in. On a panel at ONA last week, Yahoo! News Senior Editor Phoebe Connelly said they're still figuring out the best way to utilize Instagram. The @yahoonews account may only have two images and 33 followers, but at least it exists. The LA Times failed to reserve their Instagram handle, which now belongs to an unnamed user who hasn't posted a photo in 62 weeks.  

Just because Instagram is an image-based service doesn't mean publishers can't communicate with followers using words. Wall Street Journal does this by Instagramming screen shots of text typed into the iPhone's Notes app, posing questions or drawing followers' attention to hashtags and the accounts of individual reporters.

After pitching a story about must-follow local Instagrammers to the Philadelphia Weekly, I personally used the same screenshot-of-text approach to solicit user recommendations, which came pouring in. People turned my attention to worthwhile accounts by tagging users I may not have been familiar with, simultaneously pulling those folks into the conversation.  

For media outlets, Instagram is less about driving traffic than engaging readers and extending their brand to a new, wildly popular platform. That might be hard for budget-conscious decision makers to swallow, but there's a lot to be said about the value of experimentation. Engaging readers where ever they happen to be is worth the effort, even if dollar signs aren't directly attached. 

Some print outlets even print photos taken with Instagram, although not without generating controversy in the larger photojournalism community. Regardless of where you stand on the debate over whether Instagram is dumbing down photography, there's no denying the impact the app has had on the way people capture and share images. 

Part 1: How Journaists Are Using Instagram

Part 2: How Journalists Are Using Pinterest

Part 3: How Journalists Are Using Google+ 

Part 4: How Journalists Are Using SoundCloud

Brent Busboom, a 42-year-old high school English teacher in Reno, Nev., said he has printed four photo books as gifts for people in the past two years. He loves the ease with which he can share photos on Facebook, but still prints his most treasured digital snapshots.

“Truthfully, it's easier to look at photos in a photobook than it is on a website since I don't have to wait for pictures to load. Plus, photobooks are a huge improvement over photo albums where everything was the same size,” Busboom said. “The ability to manipulate photo sizes and layouts lets me structure things in a way that is both interesting and representative.”

Photo-sharing technology was supposed to make the printed photo go the way of the CD and the daily newspaper. You need look no further than the high-profile bankruptcies of Kodak and Polaroid, stalwarts of the film-and-processing era, to see the impact digital cameras and faster Internet connections had on photo prints.

But now a new breed of smaller, more nimble photo companies are making it easier for photographers to turn their favorite Facebook, Instagram and Google+ photos into prints, canvases and photo books. By tying directly into the social networks, companies like Blurb and CanvasPop eliminate the laborious step of having users upload photos for printing.

The result? Internet research firm InfoTrends is predicting the photobook market will grow from $588.1 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion by 2015.

Chris Sonjeow co-founded Picbound.com, a photo-book printing company earlier this year, right around the time Facebook was announcing a billion-dollar deal to acquire photo app Instagram. He said the company plays on the “grandma factor,” or the fact that many people still prefer prints over pixels, and the idea that many photos shared on Facebook are mundane daily events; a photo book gives a sense of importance to photos from a life event.

“Will this always be the case? Most likely not, but it will certainly not change overnight. The phasing-out period lasts decades,” Sonejow said. “Sure, there will always be people who collect vinyl records or old books, but once the general masses have a more consistent form of access, they will eventually have a new way to view their past.” 

Instagram is exploding. The mobile photo-sharing app is set to hit its 100 millionth user before its second birthday, an early growth rate that puts Facebook and Twitter to shame. As the user base grows, though, so too does the black tide of spam. 

"More Followers," "More Likes"

In recent weeks, many users have noticed an uptick in fake followers, usually with usernames such as "more_followers_here" or "more_likes_here" followed by a series of random numbers.    

What's the point of spamming Instagram? Historically, comment threads on popular photos have been a breeding ground for aggressive "follow me!" requests. While those tactics are certainly spam-like, they're not as intensely opportunistic as what these new accounts are attempting to do. 

The spam-proliferating accounts typically post no photos and have very few followers. They offer a link to a site that purports to let users buy new followers and likes. The site, whose domain is registered to one Naree Ka Ebooks in Thailand, offers packages starting at $30 for 2,000 new followers, up to $800 for 100,000.

For less than $250, the site promises to land any photo on Instagram's "most popular" page. That is, when you convert the price for this from pounds to dollars. Why this item is listed in pounds while every other item is priced in dollars is anybody's guess. In any event, the site's claim that it can get a photo to the popular page has about as much merit as SEO come-ons to wrangle the #1 search result on Google. 

The look and feel of this scam is similar to that of an earlier spam campaign that promised free gift cards to Instagram users. 

Anti-Spam Measures

That said, Instagram has done a pretty good job keeping the spam at bay. While the network has experienced an uptick in spammy-looking bot followers, the overall experience of using the service, like any social network, is still dictated by whom you choose to follow. Compared to your email inbox, Instagram is squeaky clean. 

"We have a  team that works really hard to identify spam through community flags, and we stop it as soon as it starts,"  Instagram's Community Evangelist Jessica Zollman said in a thread on Quora. 

One of Instagram's most frequently-cited shortcomings also turns out to be helpful in curtailing spam. The service's lack of a Web app, combined with the fact that links left in comment threads don't work, mean that flooding Instagram with URLs - the heart of every spammy SEO campaign in history - is useless. 

That doesn't mean that spammers couldn't dilute the experience as the service scales. The Instagram team seems to be aware of this and has pushed out new features designed to help the community collectively fight spam. In the version that was released last week, users can flag individual comments as spam, since that might lead to an influx of spammy and low-quality images.   

Editor's note: This post was originally published by our partners at GeekSugar.com. It's unlikely the public's love of Instagram will die down any time soon, but what if you just want to bring an app of fresh air to your smartphone camera routine?

Consider expanding your vision to other apps. Just like the photography service you already know so well, there are plenty of other awesome apps and communities for beautiful photos.

#1 Hipstamatic ($2)

Let's face it — Hipstamatic was here first, and it remains the thinking woman's app since you have to decide which lens and film you want to use before snapping a pic. Much like real photography, you've got to know what equipment works best in your environment.

Visit GeekSugar for the full slideshow of Instagram alternatives for your app library.

More from GeekSugar

• Fun Camera Lenses
• Gadgets, Cords, And Apps: 11 Summer Travel Tech Essentials
• 8 Great Summer Reads For Geeks
• Gadgets And Gear For The Perfect Summer Party
• Download Of The Day: Strut Type
• Perfect Posture: 7 Tablet Stands That Get The Job Done

Nikon just launched the first-ever Android-powered point-and-shoot camera. It's a smart move designed to make the company's line of consumer products relevant in a world of ubiquitous phonecams. It could also turn out to be good for mobile photography in general. If the concept catches on, we'll see a dramatic improvement in the quality of images posted on Instagram, Flickr, Facebook and other services. 

The Coolpix S800c looks no different from any other point-and-shoot until you flip it around. The back of the device more closely resembles a smartphone, complete with the Android 2.3 home screen filling up a 3.5-inch display. Yes, it will have access to apps in the Google Play store.

It's only fitting that the line between smartphones and cameras would be blurred in this way. More and more of the world's photographs are being snapped on phones and it's up to the camera manufacturers to find a way to keep up. If only Kodak had thought of something like this. 

Even the Best Smartphone Cameras Suck

The two most popular cameras used on Flickr aren't even cameras. They're the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

As nice as the cameras are on even the best smartphones, though, they still don't compare to the specs on devices whose sole purpose is taking photos. Take the camera on the iPhone 4S, which is considered one of the best of its kind. Its 8-megapixel censor is good, but Nikon and Canon both double that resolution with their entry level consumer point-and-shoots. Like previous models, the Coolpix S800c shoots 16-megapixel images. 

Smartphone cameras have other serious limitations. Their lenses have a fixed focal distance, so zooming in requires a faked digital zoom that rarely produces good results. By contrast, the S800c has a legit 10x optical zoom. To its credit, the iPhone 4S has a pretty wide aperture, which lets in a reasonable anount of light, it still doesn't do well in low light. Anybody who has tried to snap a picture in a dimly-lit bar without turning on the iPhone's (often gross-looking) flash knows that the device wasn't built for low-light photography. By contrast, cameras like the Nikon Coolpix and Canon PowerShow can boast ISO's as high as 3200, which allows for much clearer images taken in low light. 

Because of the technical restrictions inherent in an iPhone or Android smartphone, there is a whole range of scenarios and places that just don't look good on Instagram, filters or not. Sure, some users copy images from their SLR or point-and-shoot and upload them Instagram, but that's a minority of the service's 80 million users. For most, it's too laborious. By baking a familiar mobile OS into its cameras, Nikon is streamlining the process of getting higher-quality images onto Instagram, Facebook and a host of other photo apps and social networks. 

Canon and Apple, Take Note

More important, the Coolpix S800c might pressure other companies to update their own products accordingly. Canon would be foolish not to consider adapting its line of compact point-and-shoots, and both companies may consider baking a mobile operating system into higher-end SLR cameras. If smart cameras catch on, Apple and other phonemakers will be that much more inclined to enhance the iPhone's camera by more than just a few megapixels per year. 

The result of all of this would be more photos more widely shared and of much higher quality. It's a noble goal, and an exiciting one - but first we'll have to see whether consumers are willing to buy and carry device that's dedicated to snapping photos. 

Version 3.0 of the world's fastest-growing photo-sharing app went live on Thursday. Instagram's newest update goes beyond filters and cosmetic changes and puts a renewed focus on geolocation. In the process, it makes photos more discoverable and the app more addictive. 

The update's key new feature is called Photo Maps. It's exactly what it sounds like: Turn it on, and you get an extension of your profile that lays out your geo-tagged photos on a map of the globe. 

How Geolocation Helps Social Content Discovery 

Geoocation has been a buzzword for years, but for Instagram it has always lurked quietly in background. If a user geo-tagged a photo, you could tap the location's name and view a crowdsourced album of all photos taken at that location. This was an interesting feature, but it always felt like an afterthought. With Photo Maps, Instagram reemphasizes location, pulling what used to be a secondary data point out from the depths of the service and putting it front and center. 

In doing so, Instagram changes the way people browse each other's profiles and discover photos on the service. Previously, the primary way to view one's images was in reverse chronological order. Instagram photos, like tweets, got buried with time and you could view them only if you were curious enough to scroll manually back to earlier days. (This is easier now, thanks to the new version's infinite scrolling.) Remember how Facebook's Timeline resurfaced old status updates and wall posts? This is a bit like that, but it's based on geography rather than the passage of time. The photos you Instagrammed on vacation last summer - when the service's user base was a fraction of what it is today - suddenly have a new life. 

The location data included in each photo is very precise. Last December, I spent the holidays with family in Bedford, Massachusetts. On my Instagram Photo Map, a cluster of images floats far north of Philadelphia and New York, where I take the majority of my pictures. When I tap on the Massachusetts cluster - an interaction thoughtfully designed to be slick and fluid - I can see a sub-cluster of photos taken at my brother's house, a photo I took while I was out for a run one afternoon, and a photo I snapped at the supermarket down the street. Each one is pinned to the map in the exact location the photo was taken, right down to the square yard. 

Of course, this precision raises possible privacy issues. Instagram is aware of this issue. Before activating Photo Map, the app lets you deselect some photos. This is a useful security feature that can be used to untag photos taken at your own house, for example. 

This Would Look Great on an iPad

The new Photo Map user interface is very nicely designed, as is the new user profile template that comes with it. But you know where this type of UI would look even better? On tablets. Sure, the iPhone version doesn't look bad on the iPad's 10-inch screen, but the additional screen real estate offers so many opportunities from a design perspective.

There hasn't been too much noise about an official iPad app from Instagram, perhaps because people were too busy clamoring for an Android version and subsequently blown away by Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of the company. But now that Instagram has a giant parent company and more resources, a tablet-specific version would make sense. If Instagram does launch a version of the app for bigger screens, Photo Map would be right at home.

Effective Instagramming is, first and foremost, about quality. Good composition, interesting angles, worthy subjects and even a bit of humor come into play. As always on social networks, though, when you post is nearly as important as what you post. 

Why does timing matter? Everyday Instagrammers love the dopamine rush that comes with the notification of new likes or followers. We all want our photos to be seen and appreciated, or else we wouldn't be publishing them. For marketers flocking to Instagram in search of the next social marketing platform, these details are even more critical. Marketers have to maximize their reach without offending the sensibilities of the actual people on the network, who are easily turned off by spammy tactics. 

Don't be a Firehose

For the casual Instagrammer, few things are more annoying than having to scroll through a series of sequentially shot, similar-looking photos. It's a bit like when somebody spews a series of tweets in rapid succession, but as square images on a mobile screen, Instagram photos are more laborious to scroll through. 

Even if a series of images are not visually similar, it's best to space them out. For other social networks, third party apps like HootSuite and Buffer let you schedule updates over time. But even though Instagram is available as an add-on for HootSuite, it doesn't let users auto-schedule posts. That must be done manually within Instagram. 

Best Days and Times

The ideal time to post a photo to Instagram varies from users to user. It depends somewhat on what time zone the bulk of followers reside in, among other factors. The Instagram analytics service Statigram helps users get a clearer picture of what works. The service's Optimization tab features a few helpful visualizations, one of which shows a breakdown of how one's posting habits are spread throughout the week. It then suggests more optimal posting times based on when one's photos are getting the strongest response. 

In the chart above, which is specific to my personal account, you can see that I tend to post photos in the evenings and on weekends. This isn't bad, but Statigram's data suggest that I might want to post more photos during the week and that perhaps my midnight drunkstagrams would best be saved for the next morning. 

While these results may vary from person to person, it's probably safe to assume that posting very late at night will get less of a reaction from other users. 

See Also: How to Get More Followers on Instagram, 10 Most Popular Instagram Hashtags

Instagram is exploding. Sure, the mobile photo-sharing service has been the object of buzz and adoration since day one, but few could have predicted a growth rate quite this phenomenal. Instagram boasts an amazing 80 million users, the company announced today.

When Facebook announced its acquisition of Instagram in April, the photo-sharing app's user base approached 30 million. In just under four months since, its user base has grown by more than 166%, fueled in large part by the release of an Android version and tightening integration with Facebook. Instagram acquired 15 million users in the six months between Sept 2011 to March 2012. It ballooned by another 20 million between April and May. Another 30 million users in the last two months? No problem. 

100 Million Users in Two Years?

The Android/Facebook surge in signups appears to have slowed down, but the service is still growing more dramatically. At the current rate, Instagram will likely hit 100 million users by early fall, just in time for its two-year anniversary. 

To put things in perspective, it took Twitter five years to reach 100 million users. Facebook hit 100 million users in 2008, just over four years after its initial launch. 

Google+ hit 100 million after about one year, but it's worth bearing in mind that that particular social network was launched by an existing giant on top of Web services that were already enormous. Instagram, like Facebook and Twitter, was launched organically by a small team and rose to Internet stardom more or less on its own merits. 

What makes an Instagram user worthy of thousands of followers? Already being famous in real life doesn't hurt, but for the rest of us, mobile photography stardom requires a mix of quality, skill and social prowess.

One year ago, we outlined six effective ways to get new followers on Instagram.  Since that time, the company has launched an Android app, been acquired by Facebook and grown its user base dramatically. We thought it was as good of a time as any for a refresher. 

Quality Over Quantity 

On the Web and certain social services, it's possible to optimize one's way to a bigger audience. Instagram is different: There are no bots to trick or algorithms to game. As a distinctly visual medium, it demands that the content published there actually looks good. That could mean a smartly composed photograph of the utmost artistic integrity or a young woman who happens to be attractive. Or perhaps a puppy. 

Instagram isn't about creating a frame-by-frame documentary of one's life. Instead,the service is best used by carefully selecting the most visually interesting, funny or otherwise sharable moments and then gradually sending them out into the streams of one's followers. 

The temptation to post a rapid-fire series of photos at a sporting event or concert, for example, should be ignored. Not only does this dilute the quality of one's photo stream, but it has a tendency to annoy followers. As a square image, an Instagram photo takes up much more screen real estate than a tweet or Facebook status update. Dominating people's screens with repetitive, uninteresting images forces them to plough through the visual noise in a way that feels more laborious than it does on other social networks. 

It may also serve to discourage potential new followers. When other users look at your profile, keep in mind that they're going to see a block of the most recent photos posted to your account. You'll do a better job of convincing them to tap the "follow" button if what they see is diverse and of high quality, rather than a flood of shaky concert photos snapped from a distance. 

Pay Attention to What Works (and Mimic It) 

For a better idea of what kind of imagery works best on Instagram, there's no better place to look than the "Explore" tab (now designated by a compass icon). There are lessons to be learned here, but a few caveats are worth mentioning. First, there's definitely a correlation between the number of one's existing followers and the amount of "likes" their photos tend to garner. Thus, many of the "popular" photos win that designation in part because they came from popular accounts, not necessarily based solely on the merits of the image itself. 

Instagram is a lot like the Web itself in that people using it love sexy ladies and cats. The Explore tab offers irrefutable evidence of both facts, should there be any doubt. So yes, posting pictures of attractive women (and in many cases, men) and cats will always do well on Instagram. But those aren't the only things. 

If you can get beyond the ooh-yeah-sexy-ladies and just-because-they're-popular factors, the Explore tab does offer a few clues about what kinds of legitimate, less shallow qualities can get people's attention on Instagram. Many of the service's most popular photos share one of a handful of qualities: Bright colors, unique angles, effective use of contrast and subtle humor all seem to do well.  

As with any other form of publishing, it helps to look at analytics to see what does well. Instagram doesn't offer this feature natively, but third-party services like Statigram let users take a closer look at how their photos perform. In a series of color charts and graphs, Statigram breaks down a ton of metrics in thorough detail. This includes things like most liked and most commented photos, as well as habitual details like favorite filters, tag usage and which days of the week one is most likely to post photos. You can even see when users unfollow you. 

Statigram has an "optimize" tab that suggests optimal posting times and shows you correlations between photo filters and number of likes. On my account, photos given the "Rise" filter were most popular among my followers, for instance. Who knew?  

Using Statigram, you can not only get a clear picture of what's popular, but you can also dig into the depths of your Instagram account's history to see which photos were least popular, which may offer a clue or two about what doesn't work. 

Take Advantage of Tags

Like other popular social networking tools, Instagram uses hashtags to tie together posts with common subjects or attributes. Strategically tagging photos, especially using the most popular hashtags on Instagram, can lead to a flood of new likes and followers. 

Geotagging is another powerful but underrated feature on Instagram. Tagging a photo with its location adds that image to a little psuedo-archive of photos taken in that particular place. In many cases, this has a way of building up a sort of crowd-sourced visual representation of that location, be it a historical landmark or local hangout. Contributing something visually worthwhile creates a new opportunity to attract new followers. 

This is true of places you may be visiting temporarily, but its effectiveness is especially potent where you live and at venues you frequent on a regular basis. Geotagging a photo taken at the neighborhood bar is bound to grab the attention of other locals who use Instagram, many of whom will naturally want to follow their fellow natives.

Actively Interact with Others

One of the most effective ways to get noticed on Instagram is to engage with other users. It is, after all, a social network. As on Twitter, following others can result in return follows, presuming they like what they see on your account. 

Another easy way to grab the attention of like-minded Instagrammers is to generously "like" the photos that catch your eye. If you have a compliment or comment to make, don't be shy about it.  Just don't get spammy.

Adrian Salamunovic wasn’t surprised when Instagram announced in May that it was being acquired. Even before CanvasPop, the company he co-founded, became the first to print enlarged Instagram photos on canvas last November, he suspected that “something was up” based on emails he was trading with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom.

What did surprise Salamunovic was that the mobile photography app was being acquired by Facebook. “We always thought it was going to be Twitter,” Salamunovic said. 

Any change was worrisome. Almost overnight, the Instagram prints that sell for $39.99 had grown to become 20% of CanvasPop’s revenue. Salamunovic was so worried that a new owner would change Instagram or shut off its API stream that he hedged his bets and began offering a similar service for Facebook prints in March.

And when the deal was announced, he had more reason to worry. Facebook is known for the acq-hire, in which it purchases a company for its talent and then shuts down its services. (The social network did this last weekend with social sharing service Spool.) 

“You never know what a company like Facebook is going to do when they take over, so tapping into their API proved to be a very smart move,” Salamunovic said. “Even if Facebook decides to shut down Instagram tomorrow, we still have that insurance in place.”

That’s not a likely scenario, as Instagram is even more popular now than it was in May. And that’s good news for CanvasPop: Since the acquisition, the number of orders the company has received for Instagram prints has increased nearly 40%.

Instagram Trumps Facebook

That growth makes sense. Facebook’s pending acquisition immediately exposed new users to Instagram which, in turn, boosted CanvasPop’s Instagram business.

What hasn’t increased, however, is the number of orders for prints of Facebook photos.

“At first, when we saw how much Instagram’s 14 million users moved the needle for us, we thought offering canvas prints of Facebook photos was going to be much bigger than it has been,” Salamunovic said. “The interest in Facebook prints is about one-tenth of the interest we see in Instagram photos. There’s a lot of different theories as to why that is.”

Salamunovic subscribes to the simplest theory: Photos taken with Instagram look better and are more print-worthy than standard mobile device photos.

Why Instagram Photos Look So Good

What makes Instagram photos look so much better? Salamunovic listed two main technical reasons: First, the filters the app uses make almost anything look better. And second, the square format makes it easier to compose striking images than the usual rectangular frame.

“When you’re dealing with a square format, the 2/3rds rule and other composition rules pretty much go out the window,” he said. “It’s harder to mess up a square photo.”

But there are other factors at play. The social nature of Instagram means people are looking for likes and taking their time to get photos just right. Salamunovic said the increase in the number of users has not diluted the quality of photos his company is seeing.

“At the end of day, the people who are drawn to Instagram are good communicators,” he said. “Whether or not they’re good technical photographers, they’re good at communicating visually, and Instagram has made it pretty simple for them to do what they’re good at.”

Instagram photos by Dave Copeland.

UPDATE: See the latest most popular hashtags on Instagram, as of January 2013. 

First and foremost, tags are descriptive. They can also aid significantly in content discovery, allowing users to gain more exposure for the images they publish using the wildly popular mobile photo-sharing app. Tagging photos with the right terms at the right time can lead to a flood of likes and new followers. 

So what are the most popular tags? The list fluctuates over time, but we thought it would be worth taking a snapshot of the hashtags that are most commonly used on Instagram at the moment. Some of them are generic and unsurprising, like #love (the most popular), #me (a treasure trove of digital vanity) and #cute. Others refer to third-party social services, such as #tweegram, which is the name of a mobile app that lets users create and post text-based graphics into their Instagram feed.  Given that we're approaching mid-July, it's no shock that #summer makes an appearance on the list. 

10. #summer

Photo by juliawalde.

9. #igers

Photo by fozyfresh.

8. #cute

Photo by johnpaultitlow.

7. #me

Photo by monalafleur.

6. #instamood

Photo by olemstafne.