Alternatives to Instagram?

I am booked into a Instagram workshop with Misho Baranovic  a being held as part of Monash Gallery of Art, Art in the Park Day. One prerequisite is that you download the instagram app to your phone, which sounded easy enough! However I ran into a catch 22 situation, both my wildfire and my wife’s iphone use older version of software and the new instagram app will not download to either (without upgrading the operating system). Damn because earlier I had down loaded a previous android version for my wildfire, but soon after testing it, I deleted it and my instagram account. So rather than risking grief on the phones I figured I’d just use instagram via the web BUT you can now only register by using the apps on your phone so I’m locked out now. No matter I don’t mind being away from the popular “must have” and “look at me too” crowd and I have found I usually learn much more in the long run by finding my way around such constraints. So what are the alternatives for me to using instagram?

A quick google search of “Alternatives to Instagram” yields a lot options, and a lot are very anti-facebook, or just anti-apple-verse. The article by Adam Dachis of Life Hacker, covers the angst between the ios fan boys, android-ites and the facebook-haters , with some decent alternatives, both for apple and android. This PC World Slideshow gives some sound alternatives for android users. I quickly grew weary of the opinionated outpourings in many of the other articles and was surprised how little investigation or discussion into what makes instagram so popular. My conclusion is instagram just makes it easy to share photos to the web and its photo filters can help make something boring a bit more zanny! Am I selling instagram short?

So what do I really need to prepare for the, probably nothing, because I already have these capabilities on my phone.. One important aspect of a previous misho workshop was the 3 step work flow on cameraphones 1.Shoot, 2.Edit,3. Share message, and instagram does fit this approach. So my best preparation is probably just to make sure I have these steps covered. The final share step is the big one, clearly i can not upload to the instagram site but I have been uploading to shared sites for a while now and flickr is probably the easiest (not that i have been using it a lot) offering a good range of ways to upload from mobile phones. Albeit with just the fancy filters, with iconoc city names. For the edit step I prefer aviary, for my android, and whilst I only use it occasionally it does have some decent filters and editing features. The shoot step is obvious. I’ll find out tomorrow if I am prepared enough!