The Instagram service has been growing in popularity and prominence since its launch in October 2010 as an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Eighteen months down the line, the service now has native iOS and Android app offerings as well as grabbing the headlines in a big way recently due to its $1 billion cash plus stock acquisition by Facebook.
With over thirty million registered users, Instagram members will be used to launching the free of charge app on their devices and posting their favorite, filter edited photographs to their followers in the hope that they get some likes or comments back. A talented young web developer known as Will Evans has decided to use the Instagram API to produce the Webagram.net website, which allows all registered Instagram users to have a free of charge website for their uploaded photographs.
Webagram is billed as a service that offers a personal website for your photographs from Instagram, but it also has additional options such as being able to quickly download all photographs that have been uploaded to your account. To use the Webagram service, users must first give permission for their photographs to be accessed and displayed, something that is handled through a redirection when signing up through the homepage. As soon as permission has been given, photographs are quickly and efficiently displayed on their own website which is given the URL http://www.webagram.net/[Instagram_Username].
Photographs are organized in an easy to view, attractive fashion, clearly showing the image as well as any tagline that was included at the time of upload along with a small section showing how many people have liked the image. Clicking on the photograph invokes a pop-up window which shows a larger version of the image with the inclusion of any user comments that the photograph may have received through the Instagram apps.
To finish the experience off, Webagram also has some simple Twitter integration that allows users to quickly tweet out about their personal Instagram website as well as being able to follow the developer for updates. Due to limitations with the Instagram API, Webagram is only able to display images and doesn’t allow users to post to the Instagram network, but it definitely offers a well presented experience for easy visualization of images.
The only real issue that I have with the service concerns the downloading of images. When selected, the images are prepared behind the scenes and downloaded to your computer in a compressed zip format, which in itself is not a problem. However, if you have a lot of images, the service takes quite some time to package the photographs with no on screen notifications to inform the user of what is happening.
The service is free of charge and is available over at Webagram.net. Heed the homepage notifications that inform potential users that using the service will mean all Instagram photographs are available to view on line publicly meaning that they can also be downloaded by anyone visiting the site. If you would like an example of what this site offers, why not head on over and view my own personal Webagram site which features all of my personal Instagram photographs.
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