The world loves to Instagram their lives, apparently. The app made our top 10 social apps of the year list, and was named Apple’s app of the year. All of this popularity is thanks to iOS and its web presence.
The app has over 15 million users, and has promised an Android app sometime in 2012. That leaves a lot of people out of luck when they want to view some of Instagram’s best photos.
There are quite a few sites that let you search for Instagram photos, but we found one that is absolutely gorgeous and creates an experience that Instagram should think about porting over to its own site. It also lets people without the app check out your photos in an artistic way.
PhotoPile generates a pile of photos for you to click-through, showing the people who favorited them, and the comments that they left.
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All of your friends who don’t have an iPhone can only see your photos when you tweet them or post them to your Facebook wall. They don’t stand out on these sites, since everything flies by so fast. PhotoPile gives you a well designed presence for your Instagram photos, and lets people discover everything you’ve filtered and shared using the app. Just authorize the app, and you’ll be presented with your own page that looks something like this:
While it just looks like a pile of photos at first glance, you can click on them to get to the full details of the photo. The site uses really fun fonts to display comments, and it’s actually a better way to view photos than Instagram’s own app stream. When you’re in the app, you can click over to someone’s profile and see their photo thumbnails, but it’s not really exciting or special. The experience on PhotoPile is, though.
In addition to showing off your own pics, you can search for users and tags, which will then be displayed in the same way as your own photos. You can cycle through all of the results by clicking “More Photos”, and you’ll find yourself clicking away until you’ve realized how much time you’ve spent.
In addition to an Android and Windows Phone version of its app, I would love to see Instagram spend more time on its website in 2012. The folks who made PhotoPile would be a good group of designers to bring in for the project. This is proof of why I love APIs, you never know what developers are going to come up with for your favorite services.
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