Hipstamatic and Instagram team up for even more retro photo fun

Instagram and Hipstamatic have come together to form a friendly partnership all about taking great photos, applying cool filters and bringing their two dedicated communities together in a haze of dreamy, retro goodness.

For a long time Instagram and Hipstamatic have been considered rivals, with a range of similar retro filters, borders and sharing features, but today Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO Lucas Buick has revealed to Fast Company that both photo app titans have partnered up, so you can share your Hipstamatic photos with your Instagram followers now too. Awh, it’s nice to see apps making friends like that, right?

From what we can tell, you’ll be able to edit photos in Hipstamatic, then share them to Instagram from within the app, so they appear with a “taken with Hipstamatic” attribution at the bottom.

Although it may seem strange two competing apps are joining forces in this way, Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO Lucas Buick said the partnership just seems to make sense for both parties, especially considering those who love Hipstamatic and its features want to be a part of the Instagram community too:

“When we launched, it was all about Facebook and Flickr and Twitter, and now we’re seeing a huge shift in our user base toward Instagram,”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom mirrored Buick’s views and said that many users were editing their photos in Hipstamatic before sharing to their Instagram followers anyway:

“We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

This isn’t the first time you’ve been able to share photos edited elsewhere to Instagram, one of our favourite photos apps 100 Cameras in 1 has allowed users to do that for a while now, but it is the first time that an app with such a huge following has tapped into the Instagram community.

We hope the partnership won’t cause any friction, but will instead bring two dedicated communities together and further prove that Instagram is more of a social network and not just another run-of-the-mill photo app.

[Via Fast Company]