Starmatic, an alternative to Instagram
Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 1:21PM | Editor "Starmatic, Rediscovering Photography"
With Facebook's reported plans for Instagram (advertising), many of its users have been looking for alternative photo sharing social networks to move to, so in this post, I'm going to take a brief look at just one of the alternatives, Starmatic, that recently won the FWA Mobile Award for cutting edge design. Now I should point out at this stage, that there are a number of alternatives, which include EyeEm, tadaa and of course the granddaddy of them all, Flickr, and you should also be aware that I am involved with the Starmatic team on an advisory basis, so some of you may not want to read past this point, but for those who do, then I will be as impartial as I can.
Starmatic has been created by a small French startup company, and is all about "iPhoneography" and "mobile photo" sharing, and who at time of writing have funded all the development themselves, which makes their achievements to-date very impressive, when you consider app development and storage costs. 
When looking for a name for their app, one of the team members came across an old Kodak camera. Not knowing what it was, they did a quick online search and discovered it was from the famous Box Brownie range, and was called a Starmatic, and so the name was chosen, the app had a direction, and an old camera was reborn for todays digital world.
So, now you know a little bit about the apps background, lets take a look at the app itself. Once installed, launched and signed in/up to, you are presented with a nice simple and clean looking interface, that has links to your profile page, your feeds, featured photographers, photos captured and shared around you, an option to discover new images and photographers, as well as a button to launch the built-in camera app.
Starmatic features, a quick look:
- Profile: This has a really cool feature, where in addition to your bio, showing the number of photos you've uploaded/shared, the number of followers you have, and the number of people you are following, you can also personalise the header of your profile page with one of your photos. This is also the place where you can link Starmatic to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as use their new import tool, to import all your Instagram photos.
- My Feeds: This, as the name suggests is the place you see all the images shared by the people you are following, and like all social photo sharing networks, is the place you can like, comment on and/or share photos with the wider world. Now there is a feature here that I've not seen elsewhere, and that is the ability to "Repost" an image to your feed, making it is a great way to spread/share somebody else’s work.
- Featured: This section is curated by the Starmatic team, and shows the images they like (kind of like 500px editors choice), so no one can make it to the featured page, just by getting liked!
- Discover: Again, curated by the Starmatic team, this sections offers suggested members to follow, trending hash tags, as well as offering you the options to do your own searches and/or discoveries.
- Nearby: This simply shows any photos taken and share based on your current location.
- Notifications: This shows you who's following you, liked your photos, or more importantly, interacted with you, by leaving a comment.
- The Camera: In keeping with the original Starmatic, the camera part of the app natively shoots square format photos, however you can choose to import photos from the camera roll, which unlike Instagram, lets you natively import, filter and share full-frame photos. When you've taken or imported, and before sharing, you can auto-enhance, add some blur, or apply a filter to your image. The filters, which have all been uniquely created by one of the team (no off the shelf filter packages here), offer a much wider range off effects than those found in Instagram, and in my opinion are much nicer. Once you've enhanced and filtered your photo, it's time to title it, add a comment about it, and then save and share.
So, what's my view on Starmatic? With my bloggers hat on (not my Starmatic one), here are my likes and dislikes.
Likes:
- The user interface, as it offers quick and easy access to all the apps features.
- The curated sections. For me this cuts out all the crap, and no matter how many teens flood the system, their likes will not get them liked.
- The profile page, its unique and personalised.
- The ability to import/share full-frame images.
- The filter effects are some of the best I've seen in a free photo sharing app, but it's a shame they don't save at full-res (see dislikes below)
- Auto creation of Starmatic album in camera roll.
- Instagram import tool.
Dislikes:
- No full-res camera roll saves (so far).
- No ability to block followers.
Overall Starmatic is a solid performer, with a promising and growing community, that meets different demands, and whilst it will be compared with Instagram, EyeEm and tadaa, it's like comparing a mild cheese with a blue cheese, they're both cheeses, but they cater for different tastes.
App Store Link: Starmatic; Price: FREE
Starmatic in App Review
Reader Comments (19)
I'll be there, only when they sort a few things out first.
After Facebook taking over Instagram, I knew doomsday was drawing closer. The thing is then, Facebook will have some crappy Terms of owning all your photos. They can go and kiss my backside. I can't wait for the day Facebook becomes Failbook.
Check me out - coreystevens88. Love feedback
I tried really hard to like starmatic, but it just doesn't feel ready for prime time. The interface is sluggish, it's a huge resource hog on my phone and I don't feel comfortable with how the interactions take place.
I think it's a wonderful first step, but I lost some great dawn shots today because of multiple app crashes while starmatic was running in the background. I'm going to be hesitant to look at it as a viable substitute for IG until the code is a little tighter.
- push notifications & alerts are only half done. as if you click on one it only opens the app, not directly to the image or persons profile. so for me that makes no sense.
- it is sluggish & often crashes, as well it takes forever on wifi or 3g to render an image as you watch it go from a blurry mess until it's a clear visible image.
- no full res saves.
- no delete account option
- no block feature (yet but coming) as I have a few I simply do not want following me.
- and this along with lack of block caused me to delete ever photo I had & leave my account in undeletible limbo... the latest Instagram import option. it wouldn't let me select images only import all... hmm no I didn't want all my images from IG imported. Let alone all my tags & captions, as many are catered to IG "insta this & IG that". Then to be so annoyed having all my IG pics imported I found that they were ridiculously imported & posted oldest to newest. So not only did I have a ton of photos I would never share to Starmatic, but my oldest pics were now shown as my newest posts on Starmatic.
So that was the last straw for me at the moment, after that I deleted ever photo I had & left only my ID visible as that was the easiest way to be as close to account deleted as one can get without emailing & requesting directly.
That said I do think the app is well developed, has a nice design, though not my preference as I hate the right side panel tabs & would prefer them along the bottom. The development team are a wonderful group of dedicated guys & once some kinks are worked out & things truly flow again I might look at it again.
I'm ready to move away from IG, absolutely hate the spam and the popular page!
I will inform my friends as well.
Thanks!
Thats what Instagram was good at. Getting the basics nailed, or at least updating quite frequently to meet a reasonable standard in a short space of time. Starmatic has some great potential, but we're all gonna have to wait an sit tight. You never know, something even better might crawl out of the woodwork.
I also quite like Tadaa (but no hashtagging there) and Tuding btw.
We focused our recent efforts on scaling the servers and reinforcing the code to minimize the crashes and to increase the performance.
Except for full res - which is a big topic - all the other items will be implemented quickly and easily.
As for IG import: Please note that pictures are now imported in the right order. A temporay bug has been flixed. We reverse the order of pictures upon request. You will soon have the possibility to delete unwanted comments which will enable you to remove non-desired tags.
Delete account: We currently delete account upon request but the function will be proposed in the app to make things easier for the users (and us). Note that IG does not allow it from the app.
Other then that I dig it :)
Good layout, good navigation and at times it is slow.
I have taken into account other peoples comments about low res pics, not being able to delete your account etc, but I believe these functions will follow.
The other that we all should have checked is Starmatic's terms and conditions. I'll give them a read tonight.
I've also looked at Tadaa, but it looks like one of those apps where spam will show up soon, and I don't really want to see anymore Justin Bieber or those 1 direction guys.
So far so good! :)
That's a great review of Starmatic - I will definitely try it out. I love that you can import all the photos from Instagram AND have to ability to post full-sized photos. Sometimes a photo just looks better not square!
I also have some questions for you. What's the difference between the Featured and Discover sections? Is it just one is for notable photos and the other is for notable users & hashtags? Also, how big is the Starmatic community right now? The import feature, is it manual or automatic? Is there a way to have my Instagram photos posted here automatically? I'm considering between switching and using it at the same time with Instagram while testing it out.
Thanks a lot for the post & your wonderful blog. Big fan of your "Through the Lens of an iPhone" weekly!