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Five fun photo apps for the iPad 2

They break down as follows: three photo-browsing apps, a photo-processing app, and a photo-booth app.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
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Given its size, the iPad 2 is a better photo viewer than photo taker (unless it's acting as a photo booth). And as a photo viewer, it's fantastic. Flipping through photos on the iPad's touch screen pulls you closer to the images than clicking through photos on a laptop or desktop with a keyboard. I recently tried out three photo-browsing apps, a photo-processing app, and a photo-booth app on the iPad. I offer you my thoughts on each.

First up, two apps for browsing Instagram images. My favorite of the duo is Instagallery, which lets you view your Instagram feed, photos you have liked, photos by various tags, and popular photos. Instagram photos look big and bold on the iPad, and with Instagallery, you can set up slideshows.

The other Instagram-browsing app is Instamap, which groups photos by location. From the map, tap on a collection of photos in, say, Barcelona, and you can see recent Instagrams from iPhone users in that city. Viewing by location a mixed bag; mundane Instagrams certainly outweighed stunning shots of architecture, for instance, in my experience. You can also view by tags, though it displays only a few dozen of the most recent photos with a particular tag.

Next up, an app that turns your iPad into a Facebook photo album. The appropriately named Facebook Photo Album mimics an old photo album, letting you flip through your or your Facebook friends' photos, four photos at a time. It's a great way to see Facebook from a different angle, particularly if you are waiting for the new Facebook Timeline to get rolled out to you.

Have you ever taken a shot with your iPhone or iPad's native camera app and wished you had used Instagram or Hipstamatic so you could apply a filter? With Pixlr-o-matic, you can doctor up your photos after the fact. The free and surprisingly ad-free app lets you take a photo or upload one from your photo library, then apply a filter, an effect, and a frame.

Lastly, we come to IncrediBooth, an app that turns the iPad 2 into a photo booth. It spits out four-photo photo strips and provides four different filters to keep things interesting. It's great for parties and should be required at all weddings, graduations, and birthdays.