Instagram Blog

Today we’re excited to take another step towards making it easier for people to share their lives through photos. Introducing hashtags, now supported in the latest version of Instagram.

Yes, they work similarly to Twitter hashtags, but reinvented from the perspective of an Instagram user. Now, you can add hashtags to any of your own photos by including a hashtag in the caption of your photo or in a comment. Anyone can then tap on the hashtag in your comment to see all photos with the same hashtag.

Want to see what’s going on right now at the Sundance film festival? Check out the #sundance page, where you can browse through photos taken during this year’s festival. Better yet, if you happen to be there, just start adding #sundance to your captions, then tap on the hashtag below your photo to view all #sundance photos, including your own. This feature allows for everyone from you and your friends to strangers at a conference to contribute to an ever-growing pool of photos organized by hashtag.

As a bonus, every hashtag now has an RSS Feed associated with it, which makes it easy to subscribe to new photos. If you’re interested, simply point your favorite feed reader to http://instagr.am/tags/[hashtag name]/feed/recent.rss (where [hashtag name] is the name of the hashtag without the leading #). This will allow event organizers or anyone with a feed reader to follow along with live photos as they’re added.

You can also search for tagged photos by tapping Profile tab > Search Instagram > Tags. Try searching for #streetart to check out a great collection of street art users have started documenting.

Today, we’d also like to announce that some folks on Instagram have decided to use the new feature in some really cool ways:

Charity: Water (@charitywater), which brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations, is encouraging users to share images of water in their life using the hashtag #charitywater

Want your Instagram photo featured on a limited edition can of Brisk (@brisk) at SXSW? Just tag your photo with #briskpic for a chance to be included. Check out the entries at briskpic.com

NPR’s social media desk (@npr) wants people to upload photos capturing the ideas #love and #hate, respectively

Photojojo (@photojojo) is giving away their amazing cell phone lenses to one random photo tagged with #winphotowin

Instagram user @joshjohnson is teaming up with Hatchcraft (@hatchcraft) on a Lomo-filter challenge — tag your best photos that use the Lomo filter with #jjchallenge to enter for a chance to win your Instagram photo printed out and framed in one of Hatchcraft’s beautiful bamboo shadow box frames

To learn more about how hashtags work, check out our FAQs.

We launched Instagram three months ago, and in that time, members of the community have shared millions of moments with us through their photos. As we prepare for the new year, we wanted to put together a collection of photos that tells the story of Instagram’s first three months.

Through your photos, we went on the road with one of our favorite bands (@ntnl) and watched the San Francisco Giants win the World Series (while we were in our office just down the street from the ballpark working on Instagram!). Photos have been snapped all around the world. In Paris, @parislemon took the first-ever Instagram shot of the Mona Lisa; in Scotland, @christopherhowell held the first-ever Instagram art exhibition; and off the coast of Mexico, the acclaimed illusionist David Blaine (@xblaine) shared a shot of himself reaching out to pet a Great White.

As a company, we grew from 2 to 4 people and moved into a new office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. We were ecstatic to see Instagram featured in the App Store and to welcome over a million users to our community. We even spotted an Instagram photo gracing the frontpage of the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks again to each and every member of the Instagram community who has made the app what it is today. Here’s to many more years of sharing small moments of life through gorgeous mobile photos.

@mikeyk on launch morning

#1 in App Store within 24 hours of launch

iPhone App of the Week

Our new office

Instagram reaches 1 million users

Instagram launches in 7 new languages

from The New York Times: “That moment is Instagrammable!”

An Instagram photo on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: Personal Journal

David Blaine (@xblaine) swims with sharks

@npr joins Instagram

The National (@ntnl) on Instagram

@christopherhowell puts on an Instagram art exhibit in Scotland

@sacca gets engaged

@parislemon instagrams the Mona Lisa

The Giants dugout

Giants World Series parade in San Francisco

Praise on Daring Fireball

@scobleizer instagrams Woz at the Computer History Museum

We’re excited to announce that we’ve been nominated Best New Startup and Best Mobile App for 2010 by Techcrunch. Help us win a Crunchie Award by voting for us! You can vote once per day until Wednesday, January 19th at midnight PST.