Getting around Instagram on Windows Phone (pictures)
The app is easy to use, but it's missing several key features.
Sarah Mitroff
Sarah Mitroff is a Managing Editor for CNET, overseeing our health, fitness and wellness section. Throughout her career, she's written about mobile tech, consumer tech, business and startups for Wired, MacWorld, PCWorld, and VentureBeat.
Instagram on Windows Phone lacks many of the features found in the iOS and Android apps, but its design is pretty much the same. The main screen shows a feed (above) of all the photos and video the people you follow have posted, in reverse chronological order.
You can't shoot videos with Instagram for Windows Phone, but videos that others post will show up and play in your feed. You can easily spot videos by looking for the play icon in the top-right corner. In the other apps, if you leave a video in view on the screen for a few seconds (depending on your connection), the video will load and automatically play once. Here, you must tap the video to start playing it.
The Profile tab shows your bio, user stats, and a grid or list of all of your posts. In the other Instagram apps, you can see photos you've been tagged in and your Photo Map, but both of those are missing here.
Posting a photo to Instagram with the Windows Phone app isn't as simple as it is on the other apps. There's a blue camera button at the bottom of the screen, which immediately takes you to your phone's camera roll, where you can select a photo you've already shot to upload to Instagram.
If you want to shoot a new photo, tap the camera button, which will launch your phone's camera. Once you snap a photo, the app will ask if you want to accept or retake the image. Tap accept and you'll be asked to scale and crop the photo.
When you're done cropping, tap the check mark. Then you'll finally get to the familiar editing screen, where you can choose from Instagram's famous filters (or opt for no filter at all), as well as add a frame, adjust the lighting, add a tilt-shift effect, or rotate the image.
When you're satisfied with your finished Instagram, you can add a caption, add a location, and share it to your connected social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Russian social network Vkontakte.
