Instagram is one of the most popular smartphone photo apps in the world. With over 700 million active users a month to confirm its success, it allows you to take photos or shoot short videos of up to 15 seconds and apply a wide range of vintage effects to them.
Once realized, the photos and videos can be shared not only on Instagram but also on other social networks, first of all Facebook (which owns the property, among other things).
In this way, everyone can comment, evaluate and share the photos of users subscribed to the service.
To download Instagram on your smartphone, you can open OS provider App Store (eg App Store on iPhone and Google Play on Android) and search it within the latter.
Then select the Instagram icon in the search results and press the download button to start the download first and then the installation.
Once the procedure is complete, start Instagram and press the Register button located below. In the screen that opens, fill out the form that is proposed to you by typing in it all the required information (user name and password to use in the app, email address, etc.) and press the Register button located at the bottom of the screen to complete the operation.
Alternatively, you can select the item Use Facebook information and subscribe to Instagram by connecting the app to your profile on the social network. To set the image of your profile, press the Photo button and choose whether to use an image in the phone’s library or take a picture “on the fly”.
After creating the account, you will be asked to search for your Facebook friends and your address book contacts who are already subscribed to the service. If you want, you can skip both operations by pressing on Skip.
Subsequently, you will be offered some users that are worth following: if you find someone really interesting, press on Follow and conclude the initial configuration of Instagram by pressing the End button (located at the top right).
To post a photo on Instagram, press the icon of the camera located at the bottom center and take the image to publish on the social network.
Then, use the filter gallery at the bottom of the screen to select the effect to apply to your shot and continue with the retouching of the photo by adding a frame to it (first icon on the top left), a tilt-shift effect ( drop icon ), correcting its brightness or inclination level.
When you are satisfied with the result, press the green button with the arrow(located at the top right) and type a caption to comment on the photo you are about to post.
Then select the social networks on which to publish the image (in addition to Instagram) from the menu below and press the check mark ( √ ) located at the top right to complete the operation.
In the captions of the photos, you can also enter the hashtags and you can mention other users subscribed to the service.
To deepen these two functions, we invite you to read our guides on how to become popular on Instagram (in which we showed you how to make the most of the hashtags) and how to mention someone on Instagram (where we talk about how to tag people).
Following the procedure just seen together, you can also make short videos of up to 15 seconds to post on Instagram: just select the camera icon after pressing the button to take the picture. For more info, check out our tutorial on how to record videos with Instagram.
If you want to find photos (based on hashtags) or people on Instagram, press the wind rose icon (bottom left) and use the search bar at the top of the screen to type in search terms.
To view the enlarged version of an image, select your thumbnail with your finger. In this way, you can not only see it in full size but also comment on it, pressing the Comment button, and add it to your favorites, by pressing the Like button.
If you want to “follow” a person to stay up to date on his activities on Instagram and view his photos on the home screen of the app, visit his profile (by selecting his name at the top of the photos, for example) and press the Follow button.
To view your profile, press on the icon of the profile located at the bottom right. So you can view a summary of all the photos you’ve posted on Instagram, change your account settings and view the places where you took photos on a map.