Review of Instagram

I enjoy using well written apps and other software. Instagram is not one of them. For the amount Facebook paid for this company, I fail to see how it is going to survive in the next few years. I admit the photo enhancing effects work properly and are enjoyable to use. The sharing bit is atrocious. Here is my first hand user experience.

Using Instagram on my Android phone, as I said earlier, it does a bug-free job of adding effects to my images (but this is by no means unique to Instagram. Lots of freeware can do this). As I modified each image and posted to Instagram, I noticed it was also saving a copy in another folder. Nice, I thought. But for some unknown reason, it only saved about half of them.

Now I wanted to upload my modified images to my PC. Since I don't have all the images saved (see above), I had to launch Instagram and did a "share" to my Dropbox. It seemed to do it, but when I opened my Dropbox on the PC, only the text titles appear. No images.

Next, I tried to "share" from my Android to Facebook, so that my wife can enjoy the images I had posted. Guess what? Another disappointment. I think the app on my Android is not able to share to Facebook, as it kept saying it could not locate a manageable folder on Facebook.

Looking at Facebook page, I think Facebook is not written to handle Instagram seamlessly. I would expect an Instagram folder or section to feature prominently on Facebook. It doesn't. If I spend a million dollars on an expensive car, I would park it right in front of my house.You get my point.

Finally, I thought I could send a link for my friends to click on their PC to view my Instagram images. I expected that to be a given (something like Picasa or Flickr); but good heavens, there isn't any website to view Instagram!

So how does one share his Instagram images? Only by installing Instagram on their mobile devices? Duh? This has got to be the worst photo sharing app I have ever used. It is a billion dollar insanity.