Our top 8 apps for photo sharing and storing #PhotoWeek: Instagram, Flickr, Path

It seems we’re all so obsessed with editing our photos that we’ve forgotten where we should be sharing them. Here’s our rundown of the top 8 apps to share, store and save your photos, whether you’re looking to build followers, join a dedicated community or just keep everything in one organised spot.

1. Instagram

This app should need no introduction – with 200 million active users per month and 60 million photos shared every day, it’s pretty safe to call Instagram the world’s current photo sharing app of choice.

Building on analogue camera lovers Lomography’s “shoot from the hip” ethos, you take photos with your phone, add a filter, brighten and sharpen as needed and publish to your own Instagram feed. The 15 second video function allows a little more context, and you can connect up your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr accounts to share your images far and wide. You can even send private photo and video messages to friends.

Read about the latest Instagram update here and check out 8 ways to bring your Instagram photos in to your home.

Available free for iOS and Android.

2. Flickr

Available free for iOS and Android.

Flickr is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, having built a massive community of photography nuts from the amateur to the professional. As useful for those needing images as for those seeking somewhere to share them, photos are organised in to albums and can be tagged for easy retrieval, licensed for use by others (or not) and shared with the 87 million strong community. Free accounts come with 1 terabyte of storage (that’s 1000GB!) and are accessible across all your devices, so reorganising your images is a cinch.

The mobile app acts very similarly to Instagram – take a photo, choose from a range of filters then upload – with the added functionality of adding tags and being able to create a photo album or upload in to an existing one. There aren’t any extra editing functions, so it might be worth getting your image ready outside of the Flickr app then importing it ready to upload. You can choose to auto sync any photos you take on your phone – agree to this with caution! – and all your standard account features are accessible here too.

As for video, back in 2008 Flickr were the first image sharing site to allow short video clips to be uploaded, and this is now possible directly from the app.

3. Tumblr

Tumblr is a great choice for photo sharing due to its minimalist design. No visual clutter here – your visitors can focus on the images instead. With a smart, straightforward back end layout, the app couldn’t make it easier for you to quickly upload posts, and the search tab encourages browsing of other Tumblr blogs meaning potential extra traffic for you.

You’re not restricted to images, of course, you can write text blogs, upload video and audio, and you can add a widget to your phone’s home screen to make posting even quicker. Following other blogs is easy and new posts are displayed in a list so you can keep getting inspired by other peoples’ work.

There are tons of good photography Tumblrs but Reportage by Getty Images (photo stories), Lomography (analogue photography), Sabino (inspiration blog) are great for ideas.

Available free for iOS and Android.

 

4. Facebook

Facebook probably isn’t the first photo sharing app to cross your mind, but last September they announced we were uploading 350 million photos per day to their social networking site. At the time of writing stats detailing the content of these photos were unavailable, but we can safely surmise that babies, drunken behaviour and cats were highly represented.

Using the menu bar at the bottom of the app, images and videos can be uploaded from your phone’s gallery or shot after you’ve clicked “Photo” by selecting the + buttons on the top right of the screen. You can tag before uploading, of course, either reinforcing or ruining friendships as you see fit.

Available free for iOS and Android.

For more fabulous photo sharing apps, click here for part two.

Image via Mr Script.