There's a new Tumblr-esque Facebook feature in town, and it's going to thrill the photographers among you.
iPhone owners who use photo-sharing app Instagram can now send their artfully filtered snapshots directly to their Facebook Timeline.
"The photos will appear full-sized in the News Feed along with the caption that you’ve added to the Instagram photo, and a link to the image’s public URL. This change will also display your Instagram photos beautifully in your timeline," according to a post on the official Instagram Blog.
These photos will live in an automatically created album titled "Instagram Photos." Non-Instagram users will be able to share Instagram photos that appear in their friends' Timelines by clicking the "Share" button that appears below photos posted on Facebook.
Instagram has also posted instructions on how to share existing Instagram photos on Facebook. (Visit the Instagram Support Center to find out how.)
Instagram's Facebook integration has been somewhat limited until now. As Read Write Web explains,
For as long as Instagram has been around, it has published photos at unique, Instagram-hosted URLs, which were then linked to on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The link to the image could be retweeted or "liked" on Facebook, but the image itself remained off on a cold, lonely island on Instagram's servers. The only people that could interact with the photo itself were your Instagram followers who, of course, could only do so using the photo-sharing service's iOS app.
TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis points out that Instagram's deeper integration with Facebook is likely to boost the app's membership.
Instagram enjoyed a rise in popularity last year, and will continue to see more success, having recently been named Apple's "App of the Year" as part of the Cupertino company's year-end iTunes Rewind.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said in December that the app had been downloaded 15 million times. He added that an Android version of Instagram is currently in the works.
Check out a screnshot of full-sized Instagram photos in a Facebook user's Timeline.
LOOK: [via the Instagram Blog]
