Face­book may have thought Insta­gram was a bil­lion dol­lar idea, but not every­one is a fan.  With this in mind, Face­book has released an Instagram-esque cam­era app for the iPhone allow­ing users with­out an Insta­gram account to shoot, edit and share their pho­tos right to Face­book with sim­i­lar fil­ters to Instagram.

When you first launch Face­book Cam­era, nat­u­rally you’ll need to login with your Face­book cre­den­tials, to allow for view­ing and shar­ing fea­tures.  Once logged in, the home screen is very rem­i­nis­cent of Insta­gram, how­ever, users of Face­book Cam­era will be able to view friends pho­tos as well as shoot, edit and share your own mem­o­ries.  The app works well as a photo viewer, allow­ing users to like, com­ment and tag pho­tos with a cou­ple clicks, and scroll through friends pho­tos seam­lessly, all while being a touch away from cap­tur­ing your own shots should the need arise.

Shoot­ing & Edit­ing Photos

The cam­era por­tion lacks a bit, allow­ing users to select flash and focus as the only options.  Once you’ve shot your pic, choose from one of 15 fil­ters, all very famil­iar might I add to it’s sis­ter app Insta­gram.  Con­tinue to crop, enhance and rotate your pic if desired, then click to add it to the queue of pho­tos to be uploaded.

Shar­ing

Once the photo is set to your lik­ing, it’ll auto­mat­i­cally save to your Cam­era Roll where you can leave it if you wish, how­ever chances are you’re gonna want to share it with your Face­book friends.  In this case, Face­book friends are the only net­work of friends this app can share with, so go ahead and tag, com­ment and finally share the pic(s) to your wall for all to see.  Because this is a native Face­book app, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see the option to share it via any of Facebook’s rival social net­works, but as I men­tioned ear­lier, if you’re a loyal FB user then this is a great, headache free way to share your pho­tos online.

Inter­face

One thing I really like about Face­book Cam­era is how nicely its user inter­face is laid out.  Aside from the blue accents, you’d never know it was tightly inte­grated with the social media giant.  The photo browser is a nice, sim­ple way to scour you photo feed with­out hav­ing to read all the sta­tus updates and see who’s win­ning what game.  As I men­tioned ear­lier, the cam­era is a bit too sim­ple for my lik­ing, yet the process of select­ing, edit­ing and upload­ing pho­tos is made sim­ple by the intu­itive but­ton choices and layout.

Over­all

I reviewed this app because I’m a huge fan of Insta­gram, but I have friends who aren’t.  I feel this app is great for the few who haven’t and likely won’t jump on the Insta­gram band­wagon, and those who are com­fort­able with Face­book and love shar­ing pho­tos.  If you nes­tle it nicely beside your Face­book icon, I believe it’ll get some good use and hope­fully help every­one to share more pic­tures more often.

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