BeFunky's goal is bigger than just to be a good mobile-and-Web photo editor/enhancer: The company wants to create a new, automated way for you to organize and find your photos and those of others, whether you're at a computer's browser or off somewhere with your mobile device. Unlike Instagram, each BeFunky entry point gets full citizenship, so, you can edit and upload photos in the browser as well as in the app. Like Instagram, there are filters and social discovery, but it's more organized, with categories for photo types, such as nature, pets, faces, and so on. Unfortunately, the app and service don't deliver its goals of editing plus discovery as well as the competition.
Getting Started with BeFunky
You can start with BeFunky either by installing the app from the iTunes Store or signing up on the web. Versions are available for iPad and Android as well as iPhone. Doing the latter is streamlined if you simply click the big blue button that uses a certain social network. This requires access to your public profile, friend list, email address, birthday, status updates, photos and your friends' photos. It also requests the ability to post publicly on your behalf, but given BeFunky's purpose, that makes sense. Once you've clicked the two OKs, you've got yourself a fully functional BeFunky page and account. The default profile description is cute: "One magical day a unicorn handed me a camera and showed me BeFunky. The rest is history."
Interface
The app's Home screen features two large buttons on top: Camera, and Camera Roll. Above this, a Settings gear and a smaller Create button, which you can't use unless you've selected a photo. I'm not sure why this button is even on the home screen, since you can't have a photo selected there. But the largest part of the screen is dedicated to photo thumbnails for categories like Nature, Pets, Love, and Tattoo. Along the bottom are five more buttons, in addition to Home, we get Profile, Explore, My Stream, and Activity. It seems like a couple of these are redundant, and could have been eliminated to make room for the standard Camera icon for shooting pictures that you find in most photo apps.
Editing and Enhancing Photos
For shooting pictures, the app uses the built in iPhone Camera app, so you don't get anything in the way of extras like separate focus and exposure points. Befunky has a lot more basic photo editing tools than Instagram, including white balance, leveling, fill light, and sharpening. These offer the Snapseed-like swiping gestures to increase and decrease the effects. But these work in an unusual way: You have to hit the Check mark icon once you're happy with an edit, otherwise it will be lost when you swipe over to apply another. There's an Undo arrow, that shows a small thumbnail showing each edit step, rather than actually undoing your last action. At first I found this process odd, but then it seemed to make sense.
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Next come the effect filters. Unlike a lot of photo apps that use funky names for these, BeFunky welcomely uses straightforward descriptive names like Cross Process, Instant, and Lomo. I also like how the illustrative thumbnail for each effect shows your actual photo, rather than a sample image like Instagram's balloon. I counted 29 filters in the free app, with a lot of eye-catching choices like Pop Art, Sketch, and Holga. You can purchase even more in categories like Instant, Old Photo, and Duotone for 99 cents each. Alternatively, you can buy the whole set of 65 effects in the form of BeFunky Pro, for $1.99, a seemingly better value.
Borders and frames are a similar deal: You get plenty to choose from in the app, but if those don't meet your visual desires, you can purchase more.
The text feature is something with no equivalent in Instagram. You can choose from six fonts, many background colors (or transparent background over your image), and coolest of all, you can rotate your text on three axes! Happily, you're not restricted to square output, as you are in Instagram.
Sharing, Web, Wrap
Sharing
Once you've boosted your photo's visual impact satisfactorily, it's time to share. Output options include the Camera Roll, BeFunky's online presence, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. You can choose any combination of these for simultaneous posting. If you choose BeFunky, you'll be asked for a name and category (you can assign more than one), otherwise you just need a name. When I tried uploading over 3G, there was no progress bar to show, well, progress of the upload; instead you just get a spinning "Please wait" message. This persisted indefinitely, till I restarted the app.
View from the Web
On BeFunky's site, you'll see the same categories as in the app, though of course with large thumbnails. You also get buttons for Upload, Explore, and My Stream. The last only showed me a BeFunky staffer's feed, included by default. Unfortunately, the web view doesn't give you a full screen view of the photo or one with a black background like Flickr's light table view, which puts all the focus on the image. Instead, you see a busy box around the image, with share buttons and your title and category. You also see "Points." I got 10 points each for my two uploaded photos. The number of points determines how high the photo sits in the site's Hot section.
You can upload a photo from a folder or one of your connected online services. You get all the same editing and enhancing choices as on the app, though if you want an amazingly powerful web-based photo editor, check out Pixlr. BeFunky's site also gives you all the sharing choices, with an option to save your creation to the hard drive. By default, photos you upload are public. Anyone viewing a photo can Like or comment via Facebook. An ad displays on every page, unlike Flickr which leaves individual photo pages ad-free, even in free accounts.
BeFunky aims to be the YouTube for photos, where anyone on the web can find photos in "channels" based on subject. You can subscribe to these channels, which are both algorithmically and moderator ranked, or to other users' streams. The photos I found were mostly of the Instagram ilk, gussied up with filters and effects. I like the YouTube-like channel idea, but I'm able to find a much more targeted as well as a larger selection in Flickr's Groups. Sometimes it's better to leave selection and categorization up to the users, as Flickr does, rather than applying algorithms and moderators. For example, BeFunky has a "Nature" channel, full of cliché, Hallmark-like images. I even found close-ups of people's faces ranked hight in the category. On Flickr, by contrast, you can find groups for every subset of wildlife, down to one for a specific genus of woodpeckers. And it's got over 2000 photos!
Full BeFunky site access isn't free, either. You can upload photos at reduced resolution for free, but for up to 2500x2500 pixel uploads, you'll pay $4.45 a month or $24.95 a year. By contrast, Flickr charges $24.95 a year for unlimited, full-resolution uploads and downloads. A Pro level BeFunky account costs $99.95 a year, which lets you upload photos up to 4000x4000 pixels. I regularly upload 4752x3168 pixel photos to Flickr in a $24.95-a-year account, so BeFunky doesn't offer much value. You also don't get Flickr's map geo-tagging or even general tagging, which helps people find photos of specific things.
Should You Be Funky?
BeFunky give you a good deal more photo-editing tools than Instagram, though no photo-shooting tools like you get with Camera+ and Camera Genius. It also adds YouTube-like discovery, where you can subscribe to channels and users. Its web features are richer than what you get compared with Instagram's, but pale compared with our Editor's choice photo-sharing site, Flickr. For more editing options than Instagram, the free version of BeFunky can serve you well, if not as smoothly or powerfully as our photo-editing app Editors' Choice, Snapseed. By now it's probably become clear to you that, while BeFunky does a lot of things, it doesn't do any of them best.
BeFunky is basically Instagram with more photo-editing tools and a YouTube-like discovery site.
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