(Or: In which I review Instagram, stating various social and technical factors behind its success that you’ve all realized months ago when you started using Instagram.)

Instagramme (I’m still in England) provoked a fairly negative reaction from me when it first launched last year. It seemed to be the latest in the faddy line of fauxlaroid camera apps, had the nerve to lock its social network inside an iPhone-only app, and then that app itself turned out to be a bit on the clunky side.

Curiously, despite my change of attitude, none of those original complaints have been fixed. Gimmicky filters are still ruining great photographs, social features are still locked away on the iPhone (and the website view doesn’t scale properly on the iPhone web view), and scrolling through the activity stream in the iPhone 4 app is still stuttering where Path is smooth like butter.

The most brilliant example of this filters nonsense is the following picture by Jack Dorsey: “Odd light in San Francisco right now. Very yellow.”, wrapped up in a sepia filter. I’m rather hoping that was the joke. I usually get jokes like that, but this time I’m not really sure. Either way, it still makes the point.

Filters are a success besides gimmickry though, because sometimes—especially on non-iPhone 4s—cameraphone pictures come out flat and lifeless. Harsh increases in contrast and saturation make the images pop out, and swapping between filtered and original views inevitably leaves the raw shot looking dull. Wrapped up they way they are, the ‘X-Pro’, ‘Inkwell’, and ‘Gotham’ filters will often fix an image for display.

So Instagram makes it quick to take a picture, supplies a one click fix for lacklustre colour, and then pushes it to lots of people who are far more likely to react than they are on Flickr. This is a reflection on the dismally dated state of Flickr’s new-photos UI, and also on the challenge that Instagram presents by pushing everything together into a single stream in the first place: That you must make each shot count. You’re taking pictures for the purpose of sharing, so you are challenged to make it worth someone’s time to scan over it. It’s a fun challenge.

The picture above is of a milk bottle. We still have those in England you see, delivered to our door by an actual milkman. At Christmas time, the tin foil tops get a seasonal design. This is one of my favourite shots of the year (not that I’ve taken many.) There’s no filter or correction applied at all; just the square crop that Instagram puts on all photographs. The lighting, saturation and depth of field is all from the iPhone 4’s camera, focused on the bottle top, and the slight vignette effect in three of the corners is just how the light falls on our kitchen worktop at 11am. I’m really happy with it.

Though Instagram didn’t do anything to alter the image, it did set the constraints, and it’s that which won me over.

I dearly wish that Instagram had an option to use saturation and contrast sliders (along with a ‘border colour: black or white?’ picker) in place of the olde camera fakery. I’m all for a little bit of colour correction, but the filters are too clumsy for that.

I also wish that I could take something like Path’s lovely cropped expand-contract-scroll display model to browse these photographs, rather than the glitchy overlapping headers that Instagram goes with.

Finally, metadata would be nice. That everything gets lost and stripped out by the time it reaches Flickr (which Instagram natively supports) is a real shame.

In short: I went home to England and became less of a miserable bastard about something that everyone else already liked. What a revelation. Via: Flickr / benward.