FINALLY! Photo-sharing darling-of-the-media Instagram finally became useful to me with the rollout of web profiles where you (and everyone else) can see your photos. While I've had an Instagram account for some time, I haven't really used it too much because there was no web interface and so you could only manipulate images via the mobile client. That's fine for some usage... but it's hard to go back and find older images... and extremely hard to share with people who did not have Instagram.
Now, web profiles are here and, even better, they are available at very easy URLs. Here's mine:
http://instagram.com/danyork
The resulting page is laid out very nicely, with images changing periodically:
You can keep on scrolling down to see more and more of the images that you have posted. (And yes, it kind of looks like Facebook... which makes sense since they now own Instagram.)
This is a huge benefit to me because often I have found that I've wanted to go back and find an image I took in Instagram to use in a blog post - or just to show someone. Scrolling back in the mobile app is fine for recent images, but I haven't found it fun if the image was some time back. This web profile page lets me easily scan back through all the images I've posted to Instagram.
Even better - and this is that part I find most useful - you can easily go to the individual page for a photo, such as this one:
Now I can see the image and easily share the URL for the image to people. As far as now using the image in a blog post, I didn't yet find any way to embed an image, and I'm guessing that's not there yet. But that's okay, because I can just do a screenshot of my own image and use it in a blog post. The key is easily getting to see the image in a web browser.
Very cool to see... and as a result of this I expect I may indeed start using Instagram more!
How about you? What do you think of these new web profiles? Will you use Instagram more? (or perhaps even start using it?)
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