Organising Your Instagram Photos with Collections.
Some thoughts on Facebook’s Instagram
Instagram is fantastic tool that allows people from all over the world to capture and share life in a matter of seconds. The service really has gone from strength to strength since formation in 2010.
Instagram boasts 150 million active users sharing around 55 million shots every single day. Incredible numbers, but are users being given the best possible tools to share their images with both friends and followers? I like to see Instagram as a place to store your images online as well as them being shared with your followers.
Birthdays. Weddings. Holidays. Festivals. Christmas. New Year. Photos are being taken, and in numbers.
I would like to propose Albums, for Instagram. You can call them whatever you like: Groups, Sets, Collections.
This would give the user the ability to group together numerous images and share them to Instagram as one submission. Why? Because I don’t want to flood my profile, or feed, with X amount of images from one experience or event.
I’ll use a wedding as a example, as this is the reason I’m writing this very post. I watched someone get married just 3 days ago and it’s fair to say I took a few snaps throughout the day. Images of the building, the bride and a few of the lake that was situated just outside the complex.
I could have just uploaded these images individually to Instagram but for some reason I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to group them and have them show up in one place. They belong to the same experience and for that reason should be together once uploaded.
These thoughts have been inspired by a few things.
One has been my recent introduction to Tumblr, through freelance development of custom themes. The site allows you to upload single images, but once you attach more than one image into a post, it becomes a collection of images and (depending on your theme) displays them in a really smart way. It’s almost like a collage.
Another is Exposure. This is a relatively new service by the team at Elepath. The service allows you to group together a collection of photos and annotate them in a way that tells a story. Luke Beard, who is also a designer at Elepath, recently visited New York for the first time.
Exposure allowed Luke to put all of his images from this experience into one place and tell the story of his trip through the images he took along the way. It’s pretty powerful.
Back to Instagram. I think introducing Albums could even potentially be a way to monetise the platform, it depends on how said suggestions are implemented. If they were to go with albums, that live forever, then I think they could offer a “Pro Account” that allowed the user to have as many albums as they liked with 100+ images in them. This goes back to myself seeing Instagram as more of a storage area for my images that just happens to be incredibly social.
I would rather use this than host my images on Facebook. There’s also services like Lumo by Drew Wilson, but Instagram would be adding this functionality to a already very social and vibrant platform.
The other option is that a new post-type just comes along. Nothing really changes, a little like when video came along earlier this year to counter the impact made by Vine.
I have taken a few hours to design some mock-ups, as they describe my vision a lot better than any of these words. You can check them out on my Dribbble account and be sure to tell me what you think on Twitter.
Enjoyed these thoughts? Think this would be a good addition to Instagram? Please consider hitting “Recommend”.
