Facebook has finally rolled out their very own camera application for the iPhone. The app, a direct competitor to Instagram (which Facebook now also owns), takes photos on your phone, posts the unaltered, hipster free versions into your camera roll locally, and then uploads the image to your Facebook account.
Camera ships with 15 hipster filters for aspiring iPhoneographers, lets you tag your friends in photos directly from the phone as well as quickly crop and rotate your pictures before shipping the images off to the Facebook servers.
I hate to say it, but this is the kind of thing Apple needed to do with the native iPhone camera application. Photostream is great and all, but manually emailing and iMessaging images to friends and family is getting old really quickly.
The install process for getting Facebook’s Camera application is a little bit strange. Currently you have to head to their site, click the install button, and have the company text message you a download link. It may only be temporary until the app propagates around the various App Stores, but I can’t help but wonder if its an attempt at harvesting phone numbers.
It’s also kind of strange that the app is named Camera, exactly like the iPhone’s native camera application. How that got by Apple’s review team is beyond us…