I've always heard photographers mention that the best camera you have is the one that's closest to your hands, but these days, that adage is proving ever more true. As consumers at large have started to adopt and embrace smartphones, those point-and-shoot cameras have begun to collect dust. In fact, the iPhone is the most represented camera on all of Flickr, despite the fact that it has only existed since 2007. If you're beginning to lean on your phone's camera in order to capture memories and journal experiences, allow me to introduce a handful of apps that can make the experience an even richer one.
Instagram is an obvious shoe-in. Once a fledging startup, this app now has over 100 million users and works on both the iPhone and Android. The strength of this app is twofold: For one, it boasts an enormous community of people who simply love sharing photos that capture specific moments, enabling you to receive feedback on your own shots while getting ideas from others. Second, the integrated filter set adds a bit of character to otherwise humdrum snapshots, and it's completely free to use.
Facebook Camera is another option. It's a standalone app for iPhone, offering a tailored view of Facebook that focuses solely on images instead of a mixture of status updates and photo uploads. It also boasts a free filter set, and if you're already a heavy Facebook user, this will certainly strike a chord. On Android, the Camera option is embedded into the standard Facebook app.
Path is a unique app designed currently for iPhones and Androids, with a Windows Phone version en route. It's a program designed to journal your daily movements and interactions, giving you a digital archive of the interesting things you encountered when looking back at your own Path in the future. It's a photo-driven program, and for those who love to snap a shot at every new turn, this program elegantly allows you to post those (along with timestamps and geo-location stamps) as you go about your day.
Snapseed is my final recommendation. While it's not a social network, it's a dedicated photo editing app for the iPhone and the Android that outclasses every other program that claims to do the same. It's a free tool that makes editing, cropping, straightening, and generally tweaking your smartphone images a breeze. It relies on simple swipes in order to bring out the best in your photos, and within a few minutes of tinkering, you'll almost certainly end up with a more vibrant shot than what you started with. From here, your saved masterpieces can be shared via any of the three networks mentioned above.
How do you share your photos?
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