“80% of life is showing up,” Woody Allen said. If you never post your photo or video, you can pretty well guess the number of likes it’ll garner.

Instagram knows that the #1 predictor of whether a photo or video will get engagement (i.e. likes, comments) is how quickly it gets posted. (There’s a reason it’s not called “Latergram.”) The limitations of Instagram are what help people get across the finish line.

I used the nicely executed YouTube Capture app a bit over the holiday break. To my surprise, although it works just as advertised, I never shared anything I made with it, whereas I shared half a dozen videos I made with Instagram.

Instagram battles against “the paradox of choice.” Studies show that for every additional 401(k) plan a company offers, employee participation goes down. Why? Because when people have the option to dig in & do more research (work) to achieve the ideal outcome, they get paralyzed and don’t actually complete the mission.

That’s how I’m finding YouTube Capture: It’s easy to capture a bunch (i.e. more than 15 seconds) of footage, then optionally go back and trim, edit, re I’m on the hook to go back and review/trim it, meaning that I… oh sure, I will, soon… I swear… {life intervenes}.

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week,” said George Patton. Same goes for pics & vids, General.

Thomas Jullien writes,

Instagram is an incredible resource for all kinds of images. I wanted to create structure out of this chaos. The result is a crowd source short-film that shows the endless possibilities of social media.

The video consists of 852 different pictures, from 852 different instagram users. If you are one of them, shout and I will add you to the credits.

Noting the eerie similarity of the photos, PetaPixel writes, “That’s great when you’re trying to create a seamless, crowdsourced hyperlapse journey around famous landmarks, but it stings a bit when you realize that your photos of *insert famous monument here* probably look the exact same as everybody else’s.”

[Vimeo]

Keith Schofield’s work for Darwin Deez is rather brilliant:

[Vimeo] [Via Neven Mrgan] Something tells me we’ll see more like this from my teammate Dave.

[Previously: “There’s a reason stock video doesn’t have sound.”]

Zorana Gee talks about writing a coffee table book called “…For San Jose,” which would bestow the left-handed compliment of saying, for example, “Yeah, that’s a great restaurant… for San Jose.”

I’ve wondered this about Instagram videos (and Vine, for that matter): Good, or just hard? Is this stuff worthwhile, or only “good” if you lower your expectations?

I realized, though, it’s like people building with Legos*: It is cool to see what people can do within certain constraints. One doesn’t judge a watercolor using the same criteria as for an oil painting. Different media, differently beautiful. Hey, I didn’t say it was a profound insight, but it’s made me feel better about these ultra-short-form videos as their own genre—and at last I’ve captured one I quite like.

By the way, I’m curious: Do people actually watch videos, and do they capital-L Like them? I’m finding that the vids I’ve posted draw only about one half to one third the likes of a typical photo of mine. Hopefully the companies will someday reveal numbers on actual consumption (and not just sharing) of these vids. I’d love to see whether it increases or decreases over time.

*fine, “LEGO,” pedants

Here’s an interesting project from our friends at Bandito Brothers, assembled in Premiere Pro:

Over 200 Instagrammers gathered to join us in a world’s first creative collaboration. The goal? To make a film featuring the 2014 Lexus IS F SPORT, one Instagram photo at a time.

[Via Dave Helmly]

I’ve always said that Instagram isn’t about photography, but rather about making people feel loved & validated. Perhaps the warmth of “vintage” effects is more than figurative. The NYT, writing about the benefits of nostalgia:

It has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.

Alternatively, guzzle sepia-hued video clips until your phone toasts your palms. [Via]

Products sell people a better version of themselves, and Instagram is a highlight reel. It’s not about photography; it’s about getting liked. Photos are just the vessel by which people exchange affirmation.

In the NYT Jenna Wortham thoughtfully considers how video punctures the fantasy-bubbles that Instagram photos create:

But while that shaky video that I took on the roof was definitely steeped in reality and definitely true to the moment, it wasn’t the version of the night that I wanted to remember or share with my Instagram friends.

That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.

If you want facts & figures to back this up, here are a bunch.

Can technology make people feel more comfortable sharing their videos? Maybe. In many cases it’s by moving the goal posts—simply reducing what’s possible (and thus what can be expected) to the point that people say “Well I could do that.” (Cue the old “Lowered Expectations” jingle.)

I wonder whether (or when) Instagram & Vine will let people upload video from their camera rolls. Omitting that feature certainly made it easier to get to market (as they could eliminate features for trimming, sizing, etc.), but there’s another key difference: Insisting that video be captured via the apps limits the content to things you yourself captured. Thus your feeds can’t (yet) become dumping grounds for whatever animated GIF people have found.

We shall see.

[Via]

Hmm—interesting to hear via the NYT that social media are cutting out the middleman, and thus reducing the price paparazzi can command:

“The old school way was that you would get an e-mail that said, ‘I was on vacation and saw so-and-so and I’d like to sell it to you,’” she said. “Fans are far less likely to do that now. They’d rather share it themselves first on Twitter and Instagram than sell it immediately. People are dedicated to gaining their own followings and that’s the best way to do that.”

Photos can go for a fraction of their historically high cost, she said. “It’s certainly devalued by the fact that it’s already out there,” she said.

Update: Design Taxi has a story about the NY Times running an Instagram photo on their front page. I found this comment from photographer Peter Krogh interesting:

What’s crazy to me is that the Times is granting a perpetual, sublicensable, royalty free, fully-indemnified license to its images to Mark Zuckerberg. Who cares which camera and software was used.

A neat, simple Kickstarter project:

Dig that heart-shaped button.

• Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera captures images, uses real people to describe them, and then prints out only the descriptions they create. “The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete.” [Via]
• Adobe researcher Dan Goldman notes, “This is not just a nutty art project: the same general idea is actually being used to help blind people.” He points out VizWiz, “an iPhone app that allows blind users to receive quick answers to questions about their surroundings. VizWiz combines automatic image processing, anonymous web workers, and members of the user’s social network in order to collect fast and accurate answers to their questions.”
• Text-Only Instagram is spot on. Hip hip cliché! [Via Mark Kawano]

I often say that if I could code, I’d never leave the basement*: I know what I want, but I have to rely on others to make it real.

At the moment I’m wishing for a way to suck up some or all of my Instagram-hosted images, then repost them on Facebook.  I already share each individual image via Twitter (and thus Facebook), but these don’t end up residing on FB, where family members would be much more likely to see them.  This can’t be a hard thing to implement, but I’ve yet to see it done.

Update: Thanks to Noah Mittman for pointing out Instaport, a free site that lets you download some/all of your images as a ZIP archive. It’s a great start, though just to get greedy, let me also request a way to retain image captions. For me those are often as critical as the images themselves.

* Thus it’s probably like my not being more muscular (which would lead to my getting into lots of fights): probably a blessing in disguise.

The beautiful Carousel for browsing/commenting on Instagram feeds ($5 on the Mac App Store) has been updated with a number of new capabilities, including searching, support for gestures, and the ability to see all the images you’ve liked. I highly recommend it.
Also very nice (and free): the Screenstagram screensaver.

Check out this groovy (and free) Mac screensaver from the Barbarian Group. And props to them for one of the world’s most succinct demo videos:

Weirdly, I got a blank screen when testing the screensaver yesterday, but today it works fine. [Via]