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Posts Tagged ‘Instagram’

Instagram now lets you share other people’s photos in your Stories

21 May

Another day, another new Instagram feature. Now the makers of the popular mobile image sharing platform have announced a new way to share posts from people you are following to one of your Instagram Stories—if you see a post in your feed that you consider share-worthy, you can now share it as a sticker in a Story where your friends and followers will be able to see it.

The process is easy. You simply have to tap on the paper airplane button below the post. You’ll then get a button that allows you to create a Story. If you tap this button you will see the post you want to share as a sticker with customized background. As usual, this sticker can be moved around, scaled and rotated. If you tap on it again you can pick different style options.

The viewers of your Story will see the original poster’s username and can click through to the original post and see the creators other posts. Also, you can only share posts from public accounts and, if you want to prevent your own posts from being shared in stories, you can do so by opting out in the settings.

The new and expanded sharing function takes Instagram one step closer to its parent platform Facebook, increasing the potential for Instagram content to go “viral” inside its own platform. The feature is already available in the Instagram Android app and will be migrated to iOS in the coming days.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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8×10 is an app for selling limited edition framed prints on Instagram

11 May
8×10 / @HULLOITSLYDIA

If you are a photographer, painter, illustrator or other type of artist with a large number of followers on Instagram, there is now a new way of monetizing that following. The new 8×10 app lets you sell framed limited-edition fine-art prints of your artwork.

You’ll have to select the photos you want to offer as prints and define the terms, including the number of prints the sale will be limited to, duration of the sale and of course the price. You can also add a signature to your images and opt to donate proceeds to a charity.

Next, the sale is posted to Instagram and your followers are alerted. They can access the sale page through your Instagram post and purchase if they like what they see. In the back-end, the 8×10 app offers a sales-tracker so you can keep up with your orders, but printing and global fulfillment are both organized by 8×10 to keep the process as simple as possible.

When a print is sold, 8×10 users receive their profit within the next 14 days, once the buyer’s payment clears. Using the app and creating an offer is free, 8×10 only takes a cut of your profits if a sale is made. No specific rate is given, but based on the intro video and screenshots provided through the app store, the app’s cut seems to vary in percentage depending on how much you choose to charge per print.

This quick intro video gives you a good overview of how 8×10 works:

This makes the app an interesting tool for photographers and artists who’d like to test demand for prints of their work, without making any major investment in a print run or dealing with setting up fulfillment. It does genuinely sound like an easy way to dip your toe into the print selling waters.

To find out more or try the 8×10 app for yourself, head over to the app’s website or download it from the Apple App Store.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Instagram rolling out ability to link a credit card and buy things inside the app

05 May
Screen capture: TechCrunch

After recently adding a video chat function, parent company Facebook continues with Instagram’s transformation from a mobile image sharing platform into a do-it-all application by adding the ability to pay for things within the app. The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that the native in-app payments feature is currently being rolled out to a limited number of users who will be able to make purchases from within the app.

Setup requires the registration of a debit or credit card and a security pin. Once that’s in place, you can book appointments and pay at restaurants, hair salons and similar establishments using the photo sharing app. In the future, users will also be able to purchase movie tickets and comparable items.

Screen capture: TechCrunch

The feature could potentially make a nice combination with Instagram’s shopping tags, which were introduced in 2016 and open a retailer website if you tap on a photo of a product. It’s not too difficult to see Instagram’s native payments being used for this kind of retail transaction as well. We’re intrigued by the possibilities for photographers: say, buying prints or photography services right from inside the app.

There’s no word on when the feature will be made available to more Instagram users, but given payments is a complex topic with all sorts of local rules and regulations, we’d expect availability of the function in your app will to a large degree depend on location.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Facebook is using Instagram photos to train its image recognition AI

04 May

At its F8 developers conference Facebook not only revealed a number of new Instagram features, the company also talked about how it is using the billions of images on Instagram to train the world’s most accurate image recognition systems.

Training deep learning models for image and object recognition is typically a very labor-intensive task, as each training image has to be looked at and labeled by human workers. This is a serious limitation to the size of training image databases; however, Facebook has found a way to reduce human supervision in the training process by using images that are already labeled… with Instagram hashtags.

Its researchers used 3.5 billion Instagram images with approximately 17,000 hashtags to train deep learning models and the results have been encouraging.

A computer vision system that had been trained with one billion images and 1,500 hashtags, achieved 85.4 percent accuracy on the ImageNet benchmarking tool, outperforming the previous leading system by 2.3 percent.

It will be important to manage the disadvantages of less curated labels but the Facebook research shows that less supervised training of image recognition systems could be a step into the right direction, allowing for the use of much larger and databases and therefore improved image and object recognition and classification.

Translation: finding that photo you never tagged that’s buried miles deep in your archive might soon get a whole lot easier.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Instagram gets third-party Story support and video chat

02 May

Instagram has announced a number of new features during parent company Facebook’s F8 developer conference. Firstly, you can now share to the Stories functions directly from third-party apps, without actually switching to the Instagram app. With compatible apps, Instagram will automatically pull the content in question into its editor where you can tweak the image file or add filters as usual.

On the one hand, this makes Stories operation a little easier and more seamless; however, it also means you don’t have to connect your Instagram account with any third-party apps to post a Story, avoiding any sharing of account information.

The new feature will initially be available for Spotify and the GoPro app, but more apps will follow at a later stage. The feature is rolling out to Instagram from today.

There is also a new video chat feature that allows users to talk one-on-one or within a group-chat. This could potentially make Instagram an alternative to existing video chat services like Skype.

Finally, a redesigned Explore section is expected to debut within the coming weeks.

It looks like Instagram is slowly but surely moving away from its core-function as an image sharing app and transforming into a do-it-all communications platform, offering many of the same services as sister apps Facebook and Whatsapp. It’ll be interesting to see how the new features will be implemented, and what this means for photographers who have built a sizable following on the [formerly] image sharing app.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Instagram currently testing slow-motion video and mute features

01 May
Credit: Luke van Zyl

Instagram may be getting a few new features in the near future. As originally reported by The Verge, Twitter user Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) managed to dig up a few interface changes that suggest new functionality is on the way.

Wong, a computer science major at UMass Dartmouth, came across the unreleased features by digging through the code in the Android version of the Instagram app. The two most significant features to be revealed are a new mute function, and the ability to shoot slow-motion video directly inside Instagram, shown below in screenshots from Wong’s Twitter.

The mute function would presumably work in the same way Twitter’s own mute button: effectively removing all content from a profile without the need to unfollow them. No need to unfollow that annoying friend who you want to keep up with, but whose photos you’re patently sick of.

Great way to save friendships and your sanity at the same time.

The slow-mo mode appears to be available only within the Stories section of Instagram, but it’s definitely possible we’ll see it as an integrated option within the standard video capture section as well. It’s unknown whether or not this would work with all devices or only on mobile devices that natively support slow-mo video capture.

In a statement to The Verge, an Instagram spokesperson said the company didn’t “have anything to share on this right now.” Not a confirmation, sure, but not a flat denial either—something Instagram has done when rumored features get out of hand.

These new features might never see the light of day, but it’s not unlike Instagram to randomly test new features with random users before making them public.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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This AI-powered chatbot scores your Instagram photos on color, emotion, and more

28 Apr

Do you ever wonder just how ‘Instagram-worthy’ your latest photo is? If so, you might want to check out this chatbot. The team at BBC Tomorrow’s World have built a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to tell you just how much potential your photo has in terms of attracting likes and comments.

The free Messenger is available for Facebook Messenger and ties directly into your Instagram account. After you’ve granted it permission to access your Instagram content, it’ll ask you to upload the next photo you plan on posting. Once it’s been uploaded, the Tomorrow’s World chatbot will take roughly five to ten minutes to analyze the image, taking into account the colors, composition, and even landmarks that may be in the image.

As it crunches the pixels—which can take upwards of fifteen minutes—the chatbot provides little nuggets of information on how you can make the most of Instagram. For example, it let us know that blue is a popular color on Instagram, due to its ability to ‘evoke feelings of serenity and calmness.’ It also informed us that ‘breakfast’ is the most popular hashtag on Instagram… which was news to us.

Once your image analysis is complete, you’ll get a notification and be shown a video that breaks down multiple components of your photos, scoring each section along the way. It grades the image based on color, the emotions the bot believes the snap will evoke, any landmarks that might be in the image, features within the image, and your Instagram following as a whole.

To test the chatbot, we used an image from the Lamborghini Huracan camera car article yesterday. It scored a +94. Not bad considering it received zeroes in emotions and landmarks.

Would we replace the judgement of our own two eyes with this chatbot to curate our Instagram feed? No chance. But it’s still fun to take it for a spin and see what the BBC’s ‘artificial intelligence algorithm’ thinks of various images we throw at it.

To take the BBC Tomorrow’s World for a spin, head on over to the chatbot’s page and get it installed.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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New Instagram tool lets you download a copy of all your data

26 Apr

Instagram announced plans to offer a data download tool a while ago, and today the Facebook-owned image sharing network delivered.

The driving force behind the project has been the requirement to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law, which requires organizations to let individuals download any data that’s been gathered on them. The tool is now available on the Instagram website, ahead of the May 25th deadline.

To use the tool, simply enter your email and Instagram password, and Instagram will send you a “link to a file with your photos, comments, profile information and more.” The page says the process may take up to 48 hours, but I received the download link almost instantaneously when trying the feature.

Data is provided in a zip-file that includes all your photos and videos, neatly sorted into folders by upload month. Comments, settings, messages and other non-image information is packed in the JavaScript Object Notation (json) format, so you’ll need a suitable app for viewing.

According to the Instagram help pages, you should also be able able to download your data file through the “Account Data” option in the app settings but, at least in the case of my Android app, the required update has not made it through to my device yet at this point.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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You will soon be able to download your entire photo archive from Instagram

14 Apr

Currently, if you wanted to download all of your content from Instagram, you have no choice but to use a third party service like DownloadGram and 4K Stogram. Fortunately, that may not be the case for too much longer. In a statement to TechCrunch earlier this week, an Instagram spokesperson said:

We are building a new data portability tool. You’ll soon be able to download a copy of what you’ve shared on Instagram, including your photos, videos and messages.

It’s not known exactly how the tool will work or what other data will be available for download beyond your photos, but if Facebook’s Download Your Information tool is anything to go on, it’s likely you’ll be able to download most of your content and activity into a ZIP file.

As noted by TechCrunch, if Instagram implements its new download tool before May 25th, it will ensure it’s in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law, which requires organizations to let individuals download any data that’s been gathered on them. But there’s no guarantee Instagram will get the tool out in time.

Regardless of when it happens, it’ll be nice to see an integrated tool for easily downloading your content, be it because you’re jumping to another platform or simply want to make an offline copy. It also means days are numbered for apps like DownloadGram.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Instagram ‘Focus’ mode brings fake bokeh to single-camera smartphones

11 Apr

Instagram has released version 39 of its iOS and Android mobile apps, and the update brings with it a background-blurring portrait mode similar to the “Portrait”, “Depth” and “Bokeh” modes we have seen on most recent high-end smartphones… with one major twist.

While the baked-in bokeh modes on most smartphones use the slightly offset lenses of a dual-camera setup, or other partly hardware-based methods to create the effect, Instagram’s version appears to solely rely on face detection. That means you shouldn’t expect perfect subject/background isolation and super-smooth blur transitions, but it also means single-camera phones can take advantage of the feature.

Focus mode is available in the Stories camera UI, right next to “Superzoom”. It works with both front and rear cameras, automatically blurring the background when one or more faces are detected. Focus mode works on the Apple iPhones SE as well as the 6S, 7 and 8 generations and the iPhone X. It is also available on “select Android devices”, which appears to include most current high-end Androids.

In short: Focus mode looks like a nice addition to the Instagram feature set, but if your smartphone offers a native portrait mode you’re probably better off using that and inserting the image into Instagram via the gallery or camera roll. To find out more about Focus, head over to the Instagram Press blog or update the app and give the feature a try for yourself.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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