There’s a showdown in social media town!
This morning, I decided to delete my Instagram profile. One less social media for me to use. They changed their terms and now they want to be allowed to sell my pictures to 3rd party.
That’s a no go from here.
If you want to join the troops away from Instagram there is a great wired article on how to get out of there.
Dear Instagram,
Let me reveal to you that you were one of my very trusted amongst the trusted few social media apps on my iPhone. You have belonged in the lower right corner of my phone screen for ages. You were a part of my daily procrastination scheme together with my blog reader. Well no more. Sorry. I thought you were different. In one user agreement, you went from being a trusted source to being blacklisted and deleted forever and ever. See, I don’t need you that much.
Anyway, one thing the Wired article doesn’t emphasize is where to go for your picture kick. Here are some suggestions for photosharing apps (and alternatives to Instagram).
EyeEm
Berlin-based(yey!) is a photo-sharing app that I’ve been eyeing for a while. It’s smarter (or more “semantic”) than Instagram because it tries to calculate what kind of pictures you fancy. It’s just as big a social media hit in my book as Instagram. It emphasizes discovery in pictures where Instagram was more of a stream to me.
EyeEm vs. Instagram
They almost have the same features, but on EyeEM you feel kind of isolated. It has a trait of its own which is to tag what you do in the pictures and people who are tagging their photos with the same tag show up in your newsfeed. That feature doesn’t work for me. The rest is ok even though I miss my 500 friends from Instagram and the activity there. Oh making me able to share my pics on foursquare, Flickr and Tumblr in addition to Facebook and Twitter. SO happy about that.
EyeEm vs. Flickr
First off. EyeEm, I love that you included Flickr in your sharing function. Secondly, I don’t see them as the same thing. I see EyeEM as the photo distributor (without much of a community) and I see Flickr as one of the end stations for the photo, just as foursquare, twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. That being said, I think EyeEm and Flickr could create wonders together.
Flickr
My first photo love on the internet and the first social media photosharing site. Really it had some good stuff going and I still have a lot of pictures in there. With its new app, I think the time has come to revive that Flickr account (oh, and I am already transferring my Instagram photos there).
Flickr vs. Instagram
Overall, I love the Flickr app design. But I think the linear reading of other people’s pictures is broken. You can’t really get them in a stream as you could with Instagram. That function is missed. It comes from a woman who is used to read 1700 blog posts a day in Reeder and it goes by really fast, so should my “pictures in my network” browsing. However! I have a lot of cool people on Flickr that I have caught up with again after using the service with EyeEm.
Path
It had some security issues in the past which also made me delete my profile there. It’s more closed (one of their values is to share with loved ones) so I think it’s a different type of photosharing app than Instagram. They should be over with the security issues now though.
Other suggestions that came in on my Facebook page were 500px and Tadaa (and I’ll update the list when more comes in (on the page or in the comments)).
The problem for me is not only that they now think they have the right to sell my pictures to third party companies, and that they, visually speaking are trespassing on, and occasionally stealing my property.
The problem for me is that if you can’t come up with a business model that’s beneficial without screwing your community over, then I don’t want to use my precious time on you. There are so many other places out there where my photos are safe.
And me? I personally think I will go back to Flickr, but not quite decided yet. My Instagram photos are being uploaded there as we speak though.
Update: I have been testing apps for a while today and looking at a lot of different solutions. I’m going with EyeEm for the photo community and adding it to social media incl. Flickr for safekeeping (and reviving my “old” community on Flickr).
I don’t think that EyeEm will work for me in the long run. I miss my community from Instagram. Community and love are what social media is all about for me and it’s simply just too quiet on EyeEm. I have thought about doing a new Instagram profile, however! I’m not budging yet.