Step aside Flickr and Instagram, there's a new social photo app in town! Imgur (free), long known as the go-to place to host viral photos appearing on Reddit and Twitter, as well as on countless blogs and websites, has a new official app for the iPhone. The meme-centric app lets you browse the most viral images on the Internet, but Imgur is by no means a place for serious photography, with its many animated GIFs and goofballish imagery. What it does offer is a decent experience for those with an endless appetite for the Internet meme culture and sophomoric tastes in humor.
Setup
Since there are several official-looking Imgur apps in the iTunes App Store, make sure you get the official one, from Imgur LLC. The app is a moderate 33MB download, so it shouldn't tax your iPhone's storage until you load it up with a slew of images. I like the fact that you can start using the app as soon as you install it. There's no need to create an account until later when you want to start participating in the Imgur community. The app is rated for age 12 and up (which is actually pretty high for the app store), since foul language is commonplace in posts.
Interface
The app's interface is simple and makes good use of swipe gesturing. Your only two choices at the top of the app are Popular and Newest. If you choose Newest, an initial warning appears informing you that the photos aren't moderated and requesting you to report inappropriate ones. In either view, you'll see a "card" for each image, which you can swipe up on for a larger view that also shows comments. You swipe sideways on an image to scroll through more pictures. Unfortunately, like Instagram (but unlike Flickr), you can't unpinch to enlarge a photo when viewing its card. Swiping down on a card can reveal more photos if the poster has created an album rather than a single image.
Along the bottom of the app home page you have more selectors for Most Viral, User Submitted, and Random. Your Profile page shows your reputation, posts, comments, and favorites. Swiping a profile image (which all used the Imgur giraffe in my experience) reveals a user's "trophies." You earn these by getting lots of up-votes and favorites for your pictures.
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Instagram (for iPhone)
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Member Features
You can easily download or share any image, but to engage with the community in any way, you'll need to sign in to Imgur. This is easily achieved with a Facebook login—you have to allow the app access to your friend list, public profile info, and email address. When viewing comments, you can sort by best, top, and newest.
An up arrow lets you vote up any image you're viewing, while a smaller down arrow does, as you might expect, the exact opposite. Tapping a heart adds the image to your favorites. To add a witty comment of your own, you must swipe further down into the comments. Like everyone's favorite microblogging site, Twitter, comments are limited to 140 characters. Tapping on any comment lets you vote it up or down, reply directly to it, or report it.
Nothing to See Here
Or rather, you can only see here: The app doesn't let you upload photos from your phone as you can with the Instagram and Flickr apps—a pretty serious limitation. Another is that you can only browse images—you can't search them. Oh, and forget about any kind of photo editing or image creation.
The Imgur app does bring something to the party, the ability to consume, rate, and comment on the day's top memes and viral images. But it's not much of a threat to Instagram or Flickr as an overall social photo app and service. And that's okay: I sure don't want to see most of what's on Imgur appearing on those services anyway. For a less cheeky photo-viewing experience, check out our Editors' Choice social photo iPhone apps, Flickr and Instagram.
Imgur's iPhone app is decent way to consume memes and viral images, to rate them, and comment on them, but it's lacking in several ways.
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