Streamzoo Review

WHAT IS IT?

Insta-who? Streamzoo is a socially networked photo app that lets you follow other users, post comments on their pictures and post your own works of art for all to see. You can augment your existing photos with a variety of effects or snap new pics from within the app and add comments and description text.

WHAT'S IT LIKE?

Sign in using an email address or by linking to your Twitter of Facebook account and you can instantly add new friends via your contacts book or from your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. You can follow hashtagged images, so you’re asked to select from a few typical tags to get your feed going.

Once you’re all setup, you can begin posting photos to your profile. Grab snaps from your gallery and add one of 18 different effects, including Lomo, Classical, Sepia and Xprocess. Select one and you can then tweak contrast, colour, saturation and brightness and even add a nice little border. Neatest of all, Tilt Shift lets you shift the focus of your image to a particular area of the picture. And you can add titles (up to 100 characters) and descriptions (up to 1000) and drop in popular hashtags (10 in total) to make sure you reach the biggest crowd possible. And, of course, you can post your creations to Facebook and Twitter too.

If you’re lacking inspiration, you can browse the most popular images or check out the leaderboard for the most influential users on Streamzoo. Streamzoo gives you points for posting pictures and badges for achieving various landmarks.

There’s plenty here for serious snappers – for example if you’re an avid DSLR user there’s nothing to stop you uploading your snaps from a ‘proper’ camera to wow similarly-minded Streamzoo users.

Sadly, a lot of users spend their days taking photos of themselves and posting them to various hashtags. It all ends up becoming a pseudo-‘hot-or-not’ competition but that’s the price you pay for being connected.

OUR VERDICT

Streamzoo is gathering pace as a serious contender. Currently there’s not a massive amount of UK participation, so what are you waiting for? Get downloading and, crucially, get snapping…