Welcome, New Instagram Users!

iPhone owners have been using the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, for over a year and a half. Last week, Instagram opened its doors for the first time to users on the Android platform.


It was nice to see a bunch of my friends—both those with Android smartphones and some laggards with iPhones who finally downloaded the app because of all the publicity—join the free service and begin posting. Personally, I don’t give a fig about platform wars. They’re boring, and shrill, and pointless. Anyone who takes and share fun photos is always welcome in my playground.


I’ve been an Instagram fan for a year. When I first downloaded the app, though, I didn’t get the point. “I can already share photos on Facebook,” I thought to myself. Or, “I could join Flickr if I wanted to do that.” True enough—and it may be that those services or something else might be more attractive to you. But I became an Instagram addict when I realized the following simple facts.





1. Instagram is not about the filters.


Whenever the popular press or technology writers attempt to describe the service to people who’ve never heard of it before, they talk about Instagram’s photo filters—some various effects and frames that can give your photos different looks. They range from sepia tones to black and white, from overexposed to dark and murky. The use (and abuse) of these various filters generates a lot of derision from holier-than-thou types who like to sneer about how real photographers don’t have to doctor their shots with hipster Instagram filters, and from websites who assume that the filters are all there is to the app, and recommend alternative software to users who want to apply effects to their photos.


There are plenty of other apps and software that will do a hell of a lot better with effects than Instagram. I edit my photos with effects, but out of the hundreds of photos I’ve posted there, I’ve used Instagram’s filters maybe twice. Very few people I know use them at all.


And that’s because Instagram is not about filters. Use them if they amuse you, but know that the service’s real strength is in the social aspect. That is, the sharing of photos, and finding others with similar interests—even if it’s just for a fleeting moment.


Immediacy is one of Instagram’s strengths. Last winter, Craig went into the city one afternoon and was bewildered when he started seeing people dressed up as Santa all around him. Thronging Grand Central Terminal. In the subways. On the streets. We figured out quickly enough that it had to do something with the annual SantaCon event—but I got to enjoy it remotely, at home, by looking at photos tagged with #santa or #santacon hashtags. There were hundreds of photos from various people in various states of bewilderment not only in New York, but in the major metropolitan centers around the world, snapping and posting photos of Santas.


Sure, I might’ve seen that on Facebook. (Though I didn’t.) I might’ve seen it on Flickr eventually. When you’ve got hundreds of people armed with cell phones with good cameras posting photos as it happens, though, Instagram becomes a fun and powerful place.


But you might not realize that until you glom onto the fact that. . . .


2. Instagram is infinitely more enjoyable with hashtags and geotagging.


Hashtags—that is, affixing a classifying word with a # symbol—are what make Instagram go ‘round. It’s possible to post your lovely photo of the Empire State Building onto your photo stream and have your handful of friends admire it, but no one else is going to find it without a few hashtags. If you added #empirestatebuilding in the comment, people who are looking for shots of that iconic building are suddenly going to see it. If you go whole hog and throw in some New York City tags as well—#manhattan #nyc #newyork #ny—you’re widening your audience even more.


There are people who are going to want to look at #architecture shots. If you caught the skyscraper against a particularly awesome cloud formation, there are bunches of Instagrammers who love #cloud or #sky or #cloudporn shots. There are even specialized tags like #lookup (nothing but shots of people pointing their cameras upward, for some often-surprising perspectives) and #buildinglover (for people who love taking or looking at photographs of buildings). They’re fun to explore. I’ve spent hours looking at #rustporn.


When I’m browsing photos, I often enjoy looking at other people’s shots of places and things I’ve experienced. I enjoy looking at shots of my alma mater with the #williamandmary tag, for example, and I like to moon over shots with the #detroit and #royaloak tags. Detroit has a particularly good set of Instagram aficionados who post shots under the #igersdetroit tag—your locality might, too, and they might even sponsor particularly fun events in which they’ll all get together for a photo walk, or similar social/photography events.


If you want to look at cheesecake, investigate tags like #beard or #muscle or #swimsuit or #tattoo. If you like animals, look at #cat or #dog or #pet or #penguin. Yes, there are over 22,000 photographs of penguins.


If you’ve got geotagging capabilities on your phone, use them. I find nothing more exciting than tagging a shot with the location that I took it, and then seeing what other photographs people have taken at the exact same location. If you’ve never been impressed by the infinite variety of the human imagination, you might be after you attempt that exercise.


I’m not one of those people who can take a daily shirtless shot of himself in the mirror, post it, and rely on a hundred people to hit the ‘like’ button. I tag stuff religiously. As appropriate, I tag the photo content, information about the location, special interest group tags, and I tag the apps I’ve used to edit my shots. I’ve made all kinds of new friends that way, and as I’ve learned how to write hashtags, the number of likes I’ve gotten on individual shots has climbed.


Which is all well and good, but keep in mind that. . . .


3. You cannot win Instagram.


It’s not a game. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s gratifying to get likes on your photos. It really is. It’s very gratifying to get a lot of likes on your photos. It is not going to change your life for the better, though, to get so obsessive that all you think about is getting people to click the little heart by your snapshots.


The goal should not be for you to get 20 likes per photo, or 50, or 100, or 1000. Your goal should not be to accumulate a thousand friends. Having a photo make the popular page is fun, but it’s not your goal, either.


You should be enjoying Instagram as a way to share your photos, and to look at what other people are doing with their cameras. You can see all kinds of amazing things you’d never see in your ordinary life, through your Instagram friends. That’s the reward. The likes and the rest are icing on a rather substantial cake.


4. As in real life, it's better to have too few Instagram friends rather than the wrong kind of Instagram friends.


It’s always gratifying when a stranger begins following you on Instagram. That warm, fuzzy feeling of someone enjoying your shots enough to want to seem them every time you post them—priceless.


There are, however, people on the service who are ignoring my third guideline. They think they can win at Instagram, and the plan to do so by friending anyone and everyone. You can tell who these people are pretty easily. They haven’t liked a single one of your photos, even though they’ve added you to their friends list. Typically they have only a handful of photos on their profiles, and they’re following thousands and thousands of people—or else their follower-to-following ratio is highly skewed, as in they have only 33 followers, but they’re following 15,000 people.


Often these folk are fifteen-year-old schoolgirls from Sweden. Or fourteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirls. They are often narcissists who post photos of nothing but themselves.


These people may follow you, but they are never going to look at your photos or give them likes. They’re known as ‘ghost followers.’ They attempt to up their own following—and thus the number of likes they get—by befriending anyone.


They are a waste of your time, and you don’t want them as friends. Get them off your followers list immediately by blocking them, and then unblocking them. That way, if they genuinely want to see your photos, they’ll find their way back.


Instagram uses an algorithm in its assessment for the most popular photos that’s highly-guarded and very mysterious, but the number of followers one has plays into the calculation. If you have hundreds of ghost followers, it’s going to stymie your photo’s chance ever of making the popular page. Plus, I just genuinely get grumpy at ghost followers.


If you want to use a service to get rid of them for you, use a search engine to find IGExorcist or another similar site. They’ll automate the purge of followers who never interact with you.


Generally I find the Twitter paradigm applicable to Instagram. On Twitter, if someone follows me, I will follow them back if I know them personally, or if I find them interesting. If someone follows me on Twitter who’s spammy, or boring, or just plain irrelevant to my interests, I feel no compulsion to follow them. On Twitter, I don’t get my nose out of joint if I’m following someone famous or popular and they don’t follow me.


My advice on Instagram is to follow who you like, and don’t stress out if they don’t follow you back.


However, and maybe even most importantly. . . .


5. Instagram is most enjoyable when one explores and takes chances with strangers.


If you like someone’s photograph, hit the heart button and like it. People love it when others like their photos. If you really like it, tell them so with a quick comment! Then check out the rest of their photo stream to see if you enjoy their other shots. If so, follow them, and keep following them as long as you’re enjoying the ride.


Day-to-day shots of people’s lunches, feet, and rumpled bedclothes don’t mean much in themselves, but the stories that people tell about their lives with a timeline of photographs can be incredible. I follow the feeds of talented photographers grappling with recovery issues, of men and women whose work takes them to exotic corners of the world, of parents grappling with the severe disabilities of their children. I follow some people whose shots are so quirky and odd that I can tell what type of sense of humor they have, right off, without having ever spoken to them.


I follow an aspiring film actor in Spain, and an established television actor in Los Angeles. I follow a blues guitarist in Georgia, and an introspective bodybuilder in Greece. I follow someone who crafts exquisite photos of the countryside of Norway, and other stylists who take nothing but macro shots of flowers that transcend the mundane. I follow people I’ve never met who live in my home town. I follow people whose sole aim in life seems to be taking pretty shots of their pretty selves in front of the mirror, day after day.There’s room in my life for all of that.


But the most unique thing about the service is that in the year I’ve used it, I’ve never once encountered rudeness. I’m sure it’s out there—I’m sure there are prickly people who insult others, or trolls looking to generate response with shock and profanity. They likely won’t last long. Because in my personal experience, no matter what comment I’ve made or whose photo I’ve liked, or however different from me someone is when I interact with them, I’ve only gotten kindness, thanks, and positive vibes.


In an internet culture that seems to thrive on snark and irony and negativity, that’s what makes Instagram different for me, and that’s why I keep going back.