As we know, more and more people are using their iPhones to take pictures to capture those special moments in their lives. Instagram set the bar pretty high for photo taking apps by giving you a great set of features and an easy way to make your pictures look great. Along the way, there have been many others that have tried to steal their thunder, and not many have succeeded.
EyeEm entered the scene in early August and got some very favorable write ups from some well known tech blogs. It comes with a variety of features, and although it’s very similar to Instagram, they do have some things that make them different. But, like always, the big question will be, does it do enough to convert the masses over to use it?
Capturing a Picture
Capturing a picture with EyeEm is a very intuitive process that doesn’t need a great eye to take a decent photo. They have 11 different filters to choose from and you can either apply them before or after you take the picture. What is a little disappointing is that there are no other options to choose from. There’s no zoom, focus or any other extras that you see with a lot of the other camera apps.
Taking a picture
When you are done taking your picture, EyeEm has a feature where you tag it. There is a “what” and “where” tag that you can fill out, you are given some generic ones to use or you can write in your own. Basically, you are letting people know what you are doing in the picture and where you are.
Tagging a picture
Social Aspect
Once you are done taking a picture, you have the option to share your picture to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Foursquare. But the social sharing doesn’t stop there; similar to Instagram, EyEm is, in itself, its own social network. People can “like” and comment on your photos and you are able to do the same for friends that are also using the app.
Commenting on a picture
EyeEm adds another layer to the social aspect by giving you a profile. Similar to Twitter, you can add a picture as well as a couple of sentences explaining who you are. It shows you how many people you are following and also the amount of people that are following you. The profile also displays all of the pictures that you have taken in EyeEm.
Profile Page
What I think is a great feature of the profiles is that you can pick your own unique URL for your pictures. That way, if you want to share them from the app you can direct someone to it so they can see your profile on the web. Other people can also tweet, like or +1 your picture as well as comment on them from the browser.
Profile in a web browser
Tagging
Tags, I believe, are one of the main selling points when it comes to EyeEm convincing the masses that they are different than other photo apps. After you are done taking a picture, you have the option to write what you are doing and where you are. EyeEm gives you a small amount of preset tags that you can use, or you can write your own.
Tags for your pictures
There are a few things that make these tags so useful. Let’s say you take pictures of a family vacation you went on. If you labeled all of those pictures with “family vacation,” all of those pictures are now in an album under the tag “family vacation.” Or let’s say you want to see all the pictures you took while you were at Disneyland. If you tagged all of your pictures that you took there, you will easily be able to have them all in one album without moving them around or arranging them manually. Since you tag your pictures with what you do and where you are, you easily have a wide variety of albums based on things you are doing and locations you are at or a combination of both.
Can It Stick?
When I play around and test an app, I always am thinking, “Will I use this after I am done writing a review?” With EyeEm, I’m still struggling a bit on answering that question. There are some really good things that I like about it, and some areas that I am not sold on yet. I think the tagging of pictures and web profiles are great additions to have that some other apps may not have. At the same time, it takes some time to navigate your way through and I was longing for a simpler navigation.
The other main thing I wanted more of was the ability to do a little more manipulation with the pictures. Just applying a filter just didn’t seem like that was enough; I wanted to be able to crop, rotate, and do other things to some of my pictures.
All that said, if I had to make a decision as to whether this app was going to stay on my iPhone or not, I would have to say yes at this point. I could go into the many ways on how it’s not Instagram, but that’s not what this app is all about. I think it differentiates itself enough to hold its own, and maybe even convince more people to start using it. Go and download it for free on the App Store and let us know what you think it.