Five Instagram Alternatives you're going to love

It's time to get real about jumping out of the Instagram boat now that several striking new rules have been added to their Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. You'll want to have a peek at the post SlashGear 101: Does Instagram own my photos? and carry on accordingly. If you want to keep sharing fun-looking photos with filters galore and you want to get away from Instagram, by all means, have a peek at the short list we've got here.

Before we get too deep into this guide, I've got to apologize for the slightly uneven skewing toward the iPhone audience. At the moment it still seems to be a real iPhone world when it comes to creating apps with funny filters for your camera – who knew!?

Flickr for iPhone

Flickr has a lovely app whose update recently turned it into a lovely do-it-all machine that not only works with your extensive Flickr library of photos, but adds filters on the go as well. Flickr is one of the most well-known photo storing and sharing interfaces on the planet, and the app is totally free as well. With all the cameras in the world working with Flickr, the iPhone remains the top of the stack – due in no small part to the fact that this app continues a strong connection to iOS. Have a peek at Flickr for iPhone and grab it right this minute!

Twitter

Well would you look at that? Twitter made the effort to bring on their own photo filters right after Instagram broke ties with them just this past week. Had to be a coincidence! Now you won't actually have to leave Twitter in order to take a fancy filtered photo that you're going to tweet anyway. This alternative makes perfect sense if you've always been using both services in the past. Twitter 5.2 marked the change-over for iOS, but you can also work with these filters in Android now as well.

Facebook

It's a double-coincidence, and what do you know? Facebook also has its own photo filters too – when Facebook added these filters, they were already in the process of purchasing Instagram. Turns out they didn't want to merge the two systems together, they wanted to make sure they had Instagram on their team. It might not be the best idea to "switch" to Facebook if you're worried about Instagram owning your photos, however, as the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service we're talking about above are coming straight from Facebook.

In other words, you'd be jumping right out of the frying pan and into the fire – made of little teeny-tiny frying pans themselves! Have a peek at the official Facebook app anyway – you'll never escape.

Olympus Image Share

Back in October of 2012, the folks at Olympus came out with an app that was destined to be forgotten in the wake that was Instagram. Now is the time to head back to this Olympus Image Share App and try your luck. It's got fancy filters galore and is made to work directly with a collection of Olympus cameras with FlashAir – it's hot stuff! Note: there's an iOS version now and an Android version will be out imminently if not soon!

Snapseed

Google owns the app known as Snapseed for both iOS and Android, and there's currently no more perfect image-editing app on the market for this price. When you're backed by Google and you offer up your app for free, that sort of thing happens. As it happens, this isn't a direct competitor or equivalent to Instagram because it's made not for instant-frying like the hipster-friendly shooter, instead it's made to be an extremely effective photo editing app for photos that are meant to be displayed large – it's big-time!