Yes, Virginia, the world really DOES need another photo app: Starmatic
I am one of those Instagram (IG) people (although with only three food pics out of 642, I’m not one of those Instagram people). But a little part of me died the day Facebook bought IG. I knew that little by little the IG I knew and loved would get Facebookized, and it’s been happening. Plus Google just bought Snapseed, and Twitter just added filters to its Twitpics… You see where this is going? The little mom-and-pop photo apps are being gobbled up. It’s like a game of Pac Man out there. And now IG won’t let Twitter see its pictures. The big little boys are fighting. Let’s leave them to it, shall we?
Fortunately for us, there’s a sexy, classy new photo app in town called Starmatic. (It’s made in France, which is, of course, why it’s sexy.) A couple of things have held me back from switching till now, but today I started to make the move. You see, they just enabled a feature that lets you import all your IG photos. Which I did.
Starmatic has some nice features IG doesn’t have. You can share other people’s pics in your own feed (essentially a photo retweet). As with IG, you can “like” photos, but Starmatic also lets you add pics to Favorites. If there are more than a couple of comments, they appear behind the photos (tap to reveal them), so you don’t have to look at all the blah blah if you don’t want to (yay!). You are not forced to crop your pics into squares. Now, despite all these little extras in Starmatic, you never feel like you’re choking on features (which I hate).
The app is pretty, elegant, professional. If Instagram is T.G.I. Friday’s, Starmatic is that awesome French-Japanese fusion place downtown. There are 16 very nice filters, but no frames (which adds to the classiness, though I kinda like the kitschy frames in IG).
The only thing that’s keeping me from being a total convert is that you can only send your pics to Facebook and Twitter right now, and I need to send them to Tumblr. I just do. So I hope they hurry up with that. The app is still a little buggy, I admit. Growing pains, you know. But worth it. Oh, and here’s what your pics look like on the web.
(Addendum, December 19, 2012: In the three days following Instagram’s announcement that they would sell user photos, Starmatic had 50,000 new registered users who imported millions of photos.)
Devices: iPhone
Cost: Free
Starmatic on the App Store
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