Those highly stylized square photos you keep seeing all over Twitter and Facebook? They're from Instagram.
From pics of your dinner to the ceiling in your dentist's office to aerial shots from 15,000 feet, this social hub for shutterbugs has fast become the place to gather — and the repository of some of the best snapshots on the net.
Though some photos make it out to the public domain, thanks to Instagram's elegant and robust social integration most remain cloistered within the app's private club, where users follow each other's feeds a la Twitter and can "like," "heart," or comment on the works. It's a little insidery and a lot addictive.
You can import images from your camera roll, even those you've already tweaked in other editing apps, or take pictures from inside Instagram. Either way, it lets you add titles and location info to your posts.
Instagram offers some of the handy functionality you'd expect from your point-and-shoot, too, like tilt-shifting to make what's in your viewfinder look like a teeny toy set (particularly effective on street scenes shot from your window) and the ability to move and scale your shots. But the killer app of this killer app is the ability to apply one of 16 artistic filters with names like Toaster and Poprocket to transform even pedestrian images into something that looks like a faded Polaroid, say, or a highly saturated dye-transfer.
Sorry Android users — Instagram is an iPhone-only cult for now. But stay tuned.
