Instagram updates with ‘Photo Maps’ for better browsing experience

The third major iteration of hotter-than-hot photo-sharing app Instagram landed Thursday. The new version gives the more than 80 million people using the camera app a way to browse photos on a map.

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Instagram 3.0, available now for iOS and Android, is themed around a speedier, more engaging browsing experience, the app makers said in a blog post.

“We’ve introduced a new and unique way to browse your photos and others’ photos on a map, which means you’re no longer constrained to browsing through page after page of photos,” Instagram said.

The most significant addition to the browsing experience is an experience called “Photo Maps,” a new element of each member’s profile that gives visitors an alternative, map-based way to browse the person’s collection of filtered captures. Once a person sets up her Photo Map at launch, she’ll have the option to geotag each photo upload for inclusion on the map going forward.

The result is that Photo Maps feel like personal, geo-tagged photo journals that one can pinch through to relive the past.

Instagram has also made photos easier to browse throughout the application. Bigger grid photos are displayed on user profiles, in the Explore tab, and on hashtag and location pages, and the app automatically loads more photos at the bottom of each page to allow for infinite scrolling.

The fresh release includes other style improvements such as tweaked screens, and comes with performance enhancements to make the overall Instagram experience much speedier.

“We’ve also worked hard on updating all the screens in our app to be more visually consistent and polished. You’ll notice new layouts throughout the app that feel fresh, yet familiar,” the soon-to-be-owned-by-Facebook company said. “Our engineers have also been hard at work making sure that the browsing experience is as fast as possible.”

In version 3.0, Instagram has also added a way to report inappropriate comments and simplified the process for flagging photos and spam.

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Photo credit: Urban Combing (Ultrastar175g)/Flickr