Introducing Photos of You | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Photos of You

blog.instagram.com

41 pointstalhof844 comments

Tagging. They introduced tagging people in photos. Let's not make this out to be some crazy feature, it should be a core part of a photo-based social network.

As a non-user, I was a bit shocked that they didn't already have this feature.

Nobody's making this out to be a crazy feature...

They made a video about it.

The title made me think there was some sort of face detection at work and I could see photos where I happen to be in the background by chance. I immediately had a moral debate in my head about this, before realizing it's just a tagging feature.

Is it possible for someone to explain to a rarely-social-network-site-user what Instagram actually does?

All I know is it has something to do with photos.

But you already can upload photos to various social network sites (and could already upload photos way before this whole so called social thing existed).

And marketing talk saying how great photos are (which I think people knew 100 years ago too already) doesn't really help understanding it :)

So, what does it do? :)

I'll admit to also not knowing.

My understanding, and perhaps I'm wrong, is that:

1) It's like Flickr, except it's an app on a phone rather than a web page

2) It uploads directly from the phone rather than you having to upload

3) I believe there's some type of photo effects studio

And that's the sum of my understanding, but it still doesn't add up to much... what else is there that I'm missing?

PS: I feel I've just done the tech equivalent of one-line movie synopses: http://johnvey.com/features/movies Totally failing to express what you might feel when you use the app, my knowledge of Instagram is really just what I've heard... if there's a big warm fuzzy thing I'm missing please share.

I like Instagram because it feels less serious then Facebook. When I upload something to Facebook, it feels like it has to be something good. On Instagram I can just post whatever picture I want, doesn't really matter that much. I do also not have any relatives on Instagram, which is quite nice. I think that might be one of the reasons why many like Instagram over Facebook/Flickr (or maybe it's just me that reason that way).

So Instagram pictures do not end up at Facebook? I thought they did, shows in how big need I was for an explanation :)

You have the option to additionally post to Facebook and Twitter.

It's super fast to take pictures. You don't have to use a filter, but if you do, you can make an average or below-average picture look halfway decent (or even amazing). There's very little friction to get started and it's easy to follow and interact with people. Easier said than done to get such a great experience on mobile. It's photos and social done right, in my opinion. Anectdotally, it got someone like me who never took pictures before to really enjoy the creativity and process of sharing photos with friends and have memories of things I've seen in New York.

Are these filters better than what Photoshop/Gimp/... can do?

They're probably better than what Photoshop/Gimp can do on your smartphone. Producing professional-quality portfolio pieces isn't the main use case here :)

(Speaking as someone who also doesn't quite "get" Instagram.)

No, but it's easy to use on-the-go with your mobile phone. However, there are definitely people on Instagram who care more about the look of the photos and do more professional touchups to their photos. They probably aren't there for the ease of use but for the community aspect -- posting more professional pictures for a large following.

Of course not, but you can't compare a desktop application like Photoshop to a mobile app because the use cases are completely different. With Instagram you can take the picture, select the filter, upload the photo and share to Facebook, all within 10 seconds, at the beach. During that time, Photoshop is still loading fonts and initializing action palette, on your computer at home :).

Not to mention, loads of people don't have Photoshop, have never heard of Gimp, and are scared to even try to get started learning either of them.

They are better than what most people can do with Photoshop/Gimp. People have tried to recreate them with actions but they haven't quite got there.

If you ever get an answer to this question, please post it on HN as its own story so the rest of us can share in this knowledge.

Because, like you, I have no idea what half of these social media sites are good for.

I was not a fan until recently, but my wife and her friends have been avid users for quite some time.

A. Frictionless sign up. easy to find friends [1] B. Extremely efficient to 'share' photos with the world, i.e. Facebook, Twtter, tumblr... C. Photos look good. Like, exceptionally good for just snapping your dog outside or some random place. If you use Instagram (or other filtered photo apps) you start to realize 90% of non-professional picture taken without filters look like crap. D. It is a photo sharing network. Except the photos are good. Its mobile-centric. And fairly effortless.

1. Something about finding "real" friends and starting a "new" network is very refreshing (i.e. Path's thesis). Get rid of the hundreds of FB posts I don't want to see, now just see a niche group of friends photos (not /rants) & make my photos look a lot better than 3 seconds ago when I took it.

Instagram is now Facebook Lite.

This is a great update. It makes me think that it was also a big Facebook business update that they have had. It obviously is just like Facebook tagging, in that sense, so I could see how it was probably a huge feature request to integrate it into their Instagram product.

I wonder if you start seeing some more Facebook media concepts transfer over to the Instagram product. Stuff like creating albums, doing videos (to compete with Vine, especially), etc.

I don't like the direction they took with this feature. From the screenshots it appears to place the tags on the photo itself, similar to how Facebook currently handles tags. This assumes that Instagram photos will have people in the photos. In my experience, this is often not the case and photos tend to be places and things. I do like the concept of adding a "Photos of You" section since I usually mention user handles in my caption. Prior to this feature, if you mentioned a user, they would get a notification and the photo would eventually get buried in your activity feed. Essentially this new section of your profile organizes all those mentioned photos into one easy to find place. I think they took an unnecessary extra step with the tagging IMHO

I'm surprised no one is talking about the fact that this is a pretty clear shot across twitter's bow. Users are trained to tag friends in instagram shots using twitter handles, and to generate hashtags for locations and events. This encourages users to move away from that dynamic - effectively removing a large transmission mechanism for instagram via tweeting. Yes, you'll still tweet the pic (maybe), but those in the pic won't be notified.

Very clever move to hurt a competitor while boosting internal engagement.

Any tagged Photos of You are public, by default.. You can approve them first, but you have to turn that option on. This sounds like a potential privacy issue..

I don't think it's that big of a deal. When I launched the app after updating, it had an on-boarding experience allowing me to choose either or option on how the visibility worked. It wasn't like it was a silent "default on" option that you're making it sound like. I actually think they rolled it out in a very clean, and privacy thoughtful way. Probably because of the whole privacy fiasco that had a while back.

All these naysayers about Facebook's malicious intentions in here, but I think this is actually a very intuitive feature for Instagram that a lot of users thought should have been a part of the app from the start. I'd be surprised if this weren't a feature that Instragram founders always intended to rollout. I don't think this is necessarily the beginning of Instagram's demise through Facebook's corruption of the app.

Anyone have an idea what the usage stats for instagram are these days?

I've seen a massive drop off on Facebook. It's gone from my news feed more or less just being instragram pics... almsot everyone using it... down to about 3 regular people. It feels to me like everyone I know has stopped using it, unless Facebook is deliberately hiding pics.

I read at a tech blog (can't find source now) that active monthly user counts are as follows:

Twitter: 200 mil Instagram: 100 mil LinkedIn: 160 mil Facebook: 1.1b

was that a tweet from dustin curtis? https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/329697840869814273

Only anecdotal evidence here, but I've noticed a lot fewer people reposting everything from Instagram onto their FB profiles. I see a lot more of my friends using Instragram as an autonomous social network, and at least among my friends, it seems like Instagram's user base is still growing aggressively.

Wow this is some pretty cutting edge stuff.

Awesome. This is incredible. I have dreamed about this feature. This is the disruptive technology we need. I'm certain my 97 year old grandmother will be using Instagram now. More social. Cutting edge. Invest now people.

Facebookification of Instagram, and it brings a neat feature. It makes Instagram more social... Now I can see my mom using Instagram.

This is one of those features that I always thought Instagram should have.

Clever move.

Next one is merging Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts; and then boom, they have a clean dataset ready to merge into Facebook.

Instagram can finally be a full part of Facebook, and the Instagram that we know (and, for some of us, love) will be finally completely gone.

Agree. Totally agree. I think a good move for Facebook would be to keep Instagram a stand-alone dataset and app.

Why do you think it'd be a good move business-wise? I agree with you that product-wise, it'd arguably be the best thing for end users, but I don't think that's the perspective they choose to use on it.

They have to make money somehow, but the end users are the most important. As long as they show respect to its users' privacy they deserve to make money. I'm sure they'll find more ways to combine brands and ads in the product. I just hope it'll be sufferable.

What would be the point of acquiring them then? I guess to own social networks like detergents - present an illusion of choice with separately branded products under the same parent company.

Keeping Facebook as dominent as possible on mobile. I guess...

Because instagram is growing insanely fast. faster than facebook did at the same age of the company. facebook could own both of the biggest social networks out there.

> facebook could own the biggest social networks out there.

ftfy. if they know what they are doing, they'll just merge the data into one network, and keep the user experience on the frontends the same.

Instagram's user profile page seems to be broken right now

ooo oooo Niche Alert* run a contest insta-scam, and woefully have people tag your spam page for free airline passes, or gucci bags.

internet == selfies

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