Instagram Takes Mobile Photography to New Heights with 'Layout'

As an innovative move into the photography arena, Instagram has announced the launch of a new application called Layout. This is the next standalone creation tool that has been launched by the company besides its flagship photo-sharing application.

The new app will help users to quickly build collages with photos stored in their mobile. They can then post those edited and beautified collages on Instagram, Facebook or share them with family and friends via other social media platforms. Layout can post images directly to Instagram and Facebook; save them into the iPhoneâ€™s camera roll; or directly share to apps including Dropbox, Flipboard, Google+ as well as Snapchat. Contrary to this, however, Twitter has been excluded from the list due to some technical constraints.

The new app by Instagram allows users to choose as many as nine photographs from their smartphoneâ€™s gallery, or capture a whole new series of shots for editing. The images can then be used to arrange in a variety of layouts, or can be manually resized or even swapped.

The increasing popularity of third-party applications providing such a feature only goes to indicate that there is a fair amount of demand for an app that could help create collages for Instagram and Facebook. In the recent months, Instagram users may have noticed more images being shared via apps such as Insta Picframes, Photo Grid, Pic Collage, Framatic and LiPix inflatable water slides.

An iOS app called Layout, already exists in that space which has been made by developer Juicy Bits. This particular app serves a similar purpose for Facebook, Twitter as well as Flickr. It was declared by Apple as one of its best apps of 2012 during its annual App Store roundup that year.

With the buzz around the new app doing the rounds, letâ€™s follow to see whether Layout lags behind a standalone app, or goes on to have its features integrated into the main Instagram and Facebook apps.