Hands on with Facebook Camera for iPhone
Facebook has launched Camera, a new standalone iPhone app for browsing your friends’ photos and pity new ones of your own. Were Instagram owned by anyone else, it competence be sweating bullets right now.
When Camera launches, it shows a skinny frame of photos from your iPhone‘s camera roll, along with a symbol to start holding new pictures. Beneath that is a Friends tab, a plumb scrolling, Instagram-esque list of photos your Facebook friends have taken. One of a crafty things about Camera is that it includes not only those photos your friends take within a app, yet any photos that they share on Facebook itself. Not all of those photos will fit good in a square-cropped versions that Camera presents, yet we can daub on any print to see it uncropped.
A second add-on called Me lists photos of you. we think. My Me add-on includes photos we took and photos in that I’ve been tagged, yet it doesn’t embody each such photo; it particularly didn’t embody photos I’d taken moments progressing with a Camera app itself.
When it’s time to snap a print within a app, we get a customary Camera controls, yet they’re restyled a bit. Once we snap a print you’d like to share, we can daub into it to stand it, request a filter, and/or share it on Facebook. (You can do a same with photos from your Camera Roll.) Camera automatically detects faces in photos, and prompts we to add-on them if you’d like.
Applying those filters feels very informed if you’ve ever used Instagram. Though they don’t competition a same names as Instagram’s filters, Facebook Camera‘s filters offer a same simple saturation- and contrast-tweaking options. You can post one or some-more cinema to Facebook during a time.
This is a 1.0 recover and as such is a bit quirky: we found that infrequently filters didn’t request scrupulously when we tapped on them, and that infrequently a filter preview icons – that are meant to uncover a dictated outcome on your stream print – would infrequently erroneously switch to display a opposite print of cave instead. Other times, I’d go behind to a app’s home shade and see my photos, even yet a Friends add-on was clearly selected; drumming behind and onward between a tabs corrected that issue.
So, Facebook Camera will fundamentally pull comparisons to Instagram like a few I’ve already listed. But to me, a apps don’t seem generally competitive. For Facebook devotees, Camera is substantially a improved app; it integrates some-more firmly with a service, and shares photos from all of your preexisting Facebook friends. But members of a Instagram village who cite it there, with those filters and combined options like tilt-shift, needn’t enviousness their Facebook Camera-using friends.
