Pixlr-o-matic: Android Instragram alternative

Instagram's recent policy change and retraction after negative feedback exploded on the Internet may have damaged the company's reputation at least for a short while. If you are looking for an Instagram alternative for Android devices, you may want to take Pixlr-o-matic for a test drive. The free application provides a similar functionality, that is, add effects to photos that you take with the device's camera or that you select from storage.

When you start the application on your phone you are presented with a couple of options. You can either take a new snapshot with your phone's or tablet's camera or load an image from local storage. It is alternatively possible to load the last photo that you have been working on again, or use one of the sample photos the developer of the app makes available to test the apps's functionality this way.

The photo editor makes available three basic types of effects that you can add to the selected picture.

• Color filters that you can add to the photo. The filters are named after people which can be a bit problematic as you can't really associate the names with a type of filter.
• Lighting filters to add light related elements to the photo such as shine, sparkle, metal or rainbow.
• Frames and borders.

You can add one effect from each category to your image. Here are three screenshots of the same photo. On the first only a color filter was added, on the second a lighting filter was added to the color filter, and the third shows all three effects.

The application makes available more than 100 effects, 280 overlays and nearly 200 different borders that you can add to your photos.

You can save the photo at anytime locally or share it via Bluetooth or another app like Google+ or Dropbox.

Pixlr-o-matic has a couple of interesting options on top of the functionality. You can use the randomizer to add a random color, lighting and border effect to the photo, or open the filter installer that is built in to the app to download and install additional effects and filters. There is a lot to install and I suggest you do that when your phone is connected via Wi-Fi to speed things up.

The new effects and filters add lighting, color and border effects to the application which you can then select when you edit photos. The app makes available so many filters and effects that you will spend a long time going through all of them to see what they add to the application. Definitely one of the best applications of its kind for Android.

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