Instagram Vs. Streamzoo
[Note: after typing out this entire post and then not publishing it, I found this one at TalkAndroid. It's more comprehensive than mine.]
Last year when Instagram became available for Android I, like millions of others, downloaded and started using the program to share images from my mobile life. Personally, I used it as a Photo of the Day venue, keeping Streamzoo as a place where I shared images I thought were shareworthy. Someone on Google+ asked me if I could write a comparison piece of the two and I procrastinated for, well, about a year. But, I can't seem to get the idea out of my head, so:
The contenders:
Instagram
Long the go-to app for iOS hipsters, Instagram made a name for itself as being the place to be for mobile image sharing with quick and simple camera filters to give mobile images a little trendy panache. When the app opened to Android, salivating Android fanboys and girls jumped on the app with wild abandon.
Unlike sharing images to a cloud storage service, Instagram created a stream of your images for your friends, family and total strangers to peruse at their convenience. With Instagram's success, dozens of clones surfaced and Instagram related services, like Instacanv.as, soon opened up.
As you can see here, the typical Instagram UI, showing the stream that can be scrolled through. Below are the Home, Explore, Camera, Like History and Profile buttons. The buttons execute actions exactly as you would expect from their function: Home, bring you home to your following stream; Explore allows you to explore Instagram images without having been previously connected to the uploade; Like shows a history of the photos you've likes and the comments back and forth between yourself and others.
In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for nearly $1 billion dollars (muwah ha ha ha). Within months Instagram had a cool Facebook-inspired desktop browser interface.
Streamzoo
Without the popularity of Instagram, Streamzoo flew under the radar of mobile photo sharing. Like Instagram, Streamzoo offers filters and a stream of your images, but it also offered even more image manipulation capabilities than it's rival. With Streamzoo, people had more control over their final product than just the filters capability that limits Instagram.
With width and height adjustments, such as the Instagram square, 4x3, 16x9, customizeable and a few others, when you first load in image into Streamzoo you know you're not in Instagramland any longer.
Streamzoo also has a full featured desktop browser interface.
With Streamzoo, as I said before, there is a lot more control over the final image. Other people have claimed they prefer Instagram's simplicity to other sharing options, but with Instagram's new ToS changes and subsequent controversy.
As a result of Instagram's ToS controversy many users have fled the service seeking new platforms in which to share their mobile images. With mobile photo editing apps like Pixlr Express and Google's own Snapseed, image editing and filters aren't really needed from sharing apps like they were a couple of years ago.
Many Instagram refugees have flocked to EyeEm seeking a new outlet to share their view of the world. I have used EyeEm and as far as I can tell it offers one feature Instagram doesn't and that's nearby image search, based on location where the image was tagged. The UI is sleek, but with the bright colors of the tags, it sort of reminds me of a 90s website. The filters, much like Instagram, are limited, but as I stated before, some people are looking for easy and quick.
I have found a new outlet, myself. Blogger (or Blogspot, if you will). Both easy to use on desktop and mobile, the Blogger app allows not only image uploads, but videos and multiple images per post, as seen here.
But with U.S. courts recently deciding you own your images on social media sites, not the social media companies, loading your image anywhere is now safe enough -- just be sure to pay attention to the individual site's Terms of Service and make sure they do not retain any rights to use your images without permission.
Last year when Instagram became available for Android I, like millions of others, downloaded and started using the program to share images from my mobile life. Personally, I used it as a Photo of the Day venue, keeping Streamzoo as a place where I shared images I thought were shareworthy. Someone on Google+ asked me if I could write a comparison piece of the two and I procrastinated for, well, about a year. But, I can't seem to get the idea out of my head, so:
The contenders:
Long the go-to app for iOS hipsters, Instagram made a name for itself as being the place to be for mobile image sharing with quick and simple camera filters to give mobile images a little trendy panache. When the app opened to Android, salivating Android fanboys and girls jumped on the app with wild abandon.
Unlike sharing images to a cloud storage service, Instagram created a stream of your images for your friends, family and total strangers to peruse at their convenience. With Instagram's success, dozens of clones surfaced and Instagram related services, like Instacanv.as, soon opened up.
As you can see here, the typical Instagram UI, showing the stream that can be scrolled through. Below are the Home, Explore, Camera, Like History and Profile buttons. The buttons execute actions exactly as you would expect from their function: Home, bring you home to your following stream; Explore allows you to explore Instagram images without having been previously connected to the uploade; Like shows a history of the photos you've likes and the comments back and forth between yourself and others.
In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for nearly $1 billion dollars (muwah ha ha ha). Within months Instagram had a cool Facebook-inspired desktop browser interface.
Profile takes you to your Profile and your image stream.
Camera offers the ability to upload from the phone's gallery or to take an image and then brings a left/right scrollable pool of filters to apply to your image. Across the top are the ability to turn frames on/off if the filter effect has that feature; the tear-drop option is a tilt-shift feature which has customizable width and angles; the half Sun applies an HDR-like effect to the image and the tilted box rotates your image for you.
One, either limiting or artistic challenge, feature of Instagram is the square output -- every image uploaded to the image sharing site must be formatted to a 1x1 square, no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Streamzoo
Without the popularity of Instagram, Streamzoo flew under the radar of mobile photo sharing. Like Instagram, Streamzoo offers filters and a stream of your images, but it also offered even more image manipulation capabilities than it's rival. With Streamzoo, people had more control over their final product than just the filters capability that limits Instagram.
With width and height adjustments, such as the Instagram square, 4x3, 16x9, customizeable and a few others, when you first load in image into Streamzoo you know you're not in Instagramland any longer.
Streamzoo also has a full featured desktop browser interface.
Upon first launching Streamzoo you're brought to the Popular images page. These are images that have been voted popular by the community and in the settings you can change your Home Screen from the Popular page to either your following feed or the user Dashboard. As you can see in the image below, the images are all different sizes and shapes, not being confined to the 3x3 limits (or challenges) Instagram poses.
The center button on the bottom, like Instagram, is a Camera where the user can take a picture or upload an image (or video) from the camera's storage. The button to the left shows the people and streams you're following and the button on the right shows the news feed: who has commented on/liked or shared your images and any communications between you and others as well as what pictures the people you're following are sharing, or as Streamzoo calls it, Shouting Out.
Upon first launching an image into the Streamzoo editing system, you're prompted to choose a dimension for the final product afterwards you're brought to the editing screen.
Once an image dimension is chosen you can choose a filter (more choices than Instagram), add one of many borders and add tilt-shift in a variety of shapes and sizes. One of the cool things about Streamzoo's filter options is the thumbnail images of your own picture as a preview of what the image with filter will look like.
The colors tab allows more minute control over the image with hue adjustments, saturation, image brightness and contrast. These adjustments can be applied with or without choosing a filter first thus creating a cornucopia of options for each image.
As a result of Instagram's ToS controversy many users have fled the service seeking new platforms in which to share their mobile images. With mobile photo editing apps like Pixlr Express and Google's own Snapseed, image editing and filters aren't really needed from sharing apps like they were a couple of years ago.
Many Instagram refugees have flocked to EyeEm seeking a new outlet to share their view of the world. I have used EyeEm and as far as I can tell it offers one feature Instagram doesn't and that's nearby image search, based on location where the image was tagged. The UI is sleek, but with the bright colors of the tags, it sort of reminds me of a 90s website. The filters, much like Instagram, are limited, but as I stated before, some people are looking for easy and quick.
I have found a new outlet, myself. Blogger (or Blogspot, if you will). Both easy to use on desktop and mobile, the Blogger app allows not only image uploads, but videos and multiple images per post, as seen here.
But with U.S. courts recently deciding you own your images on social media sites, not the social media companies, loading your image anywhere is now safe enough -- just be sure to pay attention to the individual site's Terms of Service and make sure they do not retain any rights to use your images without permission.
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