Before Instagram became really popular on the iPhone by making it easy to share filtered, vintage-looking iPhone photos over the Internet, there was Hipstamatic. The toy camera photo app was Apple’s 2010 iPhone App of the Year (this year it’s Instagram), and it’s rolling out a new app on Thursday that will open up more social photography possibilities.
The app is called D-Series, according to a story from GigaOM, and it’ll be in the iTunes App Store Thursday. Specifically, D-Series allows users to snap photos with their iPhones, make them look vintage with various photo filters, and then add them to a 24-photo album shared among friends. The idea is that friends remotely fill in each album together – you add photos, and so do your friends, and what you get is a collaboration of old-style photos among a specific group.
Everyone in the group for a single album shoots to the same roll, Hipstamatic says, and by the end all the photos are shared instantly with everyone included in the group. You can then share the album or individual shots on Facebook and Twitter or by email. The app will come with three “cameras,” which are basically individual filters, and more are available for through in-app purchases. All the cameras have different properties and take different kinds of photos, working off the same principle as Hipstamatic, which allows you to combine “flashes,” “film” and “lenses” to create different effects (but all of which are actually just different kinds of filters).
While there are certainly a ton of photo apps out there and just as many social photo apps, Hipstamatic’s D-Series app seems to be taking a different focus – it’s more like an event-specific sharing app, rather than one meant to be used all the time. Share an album when you go out with a group of friends, for example, and you’ll turn in photos specific to that event without the necessarily larger commitment of a vaster social network.
Hipstamatic has been pretty popular in the App Store over the last two years, and while it may have been eclipsed by the competition in 2011 with Instagram’s rising popularity, it’s clear that the team behind the app has some clever ideas soon to be rolled out. Check the iTunes App Store for D-Series tomorrow, Dec. 15 – it’ll be available for free.
