Instagram knocked the ball out of the park as it unveiled ‘Layout’, its new standalone collage app.
Instagram is following the strategy established by its parent company ‘Facebook’ to create specialized and separate field apps cross-haired at ways users like to utilize mobile devices.
The decision to develop ‘Layout’ was taken by Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom when he recognized how popular photo collages were amongst the monthly active users of Instagram.
One of five monthly active users uploaded collages with 90% of them containing faces (I wonder how many of these are girls, oh wait! almost all of them). This means around 60 million Instagram users use different company collage softwares.
The process for the creation of collages in iOS according to Systrom is too patchy; users have to use multiple apps. Also they save various versions on apple’s camera roll of the images and then use instagram to post them.
Instagram aimed to simplify this by ‘Layout’. After opening the app, you are shown your camera roll images and the option of sorting photos by most recent. It also presents a ‘Face’ option, when selected will show all of the portraits in your camera roll.
Collages of up-to 9 images and 11 combinations can be created using layout. Also a ‘photo-booth’ option is present which takes four photos using your front camera a few seconds apart (Brace yourselves, the girls will go crazy).
What sets ‘Layout’ apart from other collage apps is that no borders option is given to encourage users to experiment with different symmetry effects. And to compliment this, mirror and flip options are given along with zooming in and out of the pictures to present creative opportunities for the users.
After the collage is created, it can be shared on different social platforms as well as emailed.
The Android version for this app will be released in coming months (one does not simply forget Android).
