Featured Fridays - Instagram

I am addicted to the Instagr.am ap on my iPhone.

Now granted, my phone doesn't take the best pics.  It is an older model.  Most of the pics look blurry when seen any larger than on the screen of my phone, like when I'm viewing an RSS feed of my farm photos in large detail.  But now and then, a photo like the one above comes out, and I am just a little bit amazed.

I did apply a filter to the image of Zoey, above.  I forget which one.  It's not important.

What's important is that the ap is a) easy to use and b) fun.  You can "follow" other Instagr.am users just like you can follow people on Twitter.  By doing so, their pics (and yours) will show up in your Feed (like a Facebook News Feed). You can "like" another person's photos, and even add comments.

The Popular tab will show you photos that have been "liked" enough times to get them into the popular stream (how many "likes" does this entail?  Who knows!).  From there you may even find new fave photographers to follow.

From your Profile tab, you can find friends, invite friends, and even search images in Instagram by names and tags (thus all the words you see proceeded by the # sign).  You can even watch an RSS feed of photos by keyword (or hash tags - those words preceded by the # sign you see in the comments) on your desktop web browser.

(To do this, click on my "farm photos" link above. Copy the URL and replace the word "aspendancealpacas"with whatever keyword you'd like to view pictures of - cats, kittens, flowers, whatever).

Other websites are now springing up to take advantage of the many possible uses for Instagr.am photos, from widgets to stickers to photos and more.  To find more fun ways to use Instagr.am, check out Photojojo's post. 

I wanted to add a widget to this blog that would display my latest Instagram photos and Photojojo's post directed me to Snapfinch, which quickly and easily allowed me to do just that. After logging in (I did so using my existing Facebook account) I went to the Extras tab and put in my Instagram username, changed the photo layout to 2x2, changed the background color to black (000000) and copied the code into my Blog>Design>Add a Gadget>HTML, gave it a title and pasted in the code. Wallah! Easy peasy!

Are you addicted to Instagram too?  My username is "aspendance."  Feel free to look me up, and let me know if you're on there so I can follow your photo stream too!

Happy clicking!