Facebook Camera iOS app arrives with filters, bulk upload

Facebook's new Camera app for iOS lets you upload snaps straight to your profile, as well as adding tags and Instagram-esque retro filters.

Cropping and rotating is also on board, but perhaps the best news is the ability to upload loads of photos at once. There's one glaring omission, however -- you can't create new albums or upload new snaps from your iPhone to existing albums, and any photos you upload will be relegated to your 'Mobile Uploads' album.

Fingers crossed the ability to make new albums arrives with an update shortly -- being able to create an album and upload lots of snaps from your phone would make creating holiday albums so much easier. If you're not much of a shutterbug yourself, you can use the app to peruse your friends' recent uploads.

Shockingly for a bit of Facebook software, the Camera app actually seems to work quite well. The layout is clean and simple, and it's dead simple to take, edit and upload multiple pictures.

Snaps you take with the app are also saved to your device's Camera Roll, so you can share them elsewhere later. Any filters you've applied in the app won't be saved though. 

There's no word on an Android or Windows Phone version yet. Hopefully these will follow before very long.

Releasing the app is a slightly odd decision for Facebook, because it just bought Instagram, the popular photo app that performs a very similar function to this new effort. Now that Facebook's got its own competing photo app, will it shut down Instagram?

Stick your predictions in the comments, or on our very own Facebook wall, then treat yourself to this promotional video, complete with now-obligatory twinkly indie background music.