Since its launch back in October 2010, Instagram has quickly become the spiritual successor to the Polaroid. Anyone can take instant photos, anywhere, and share them straight away. The resulting images are weird-looking, just like Polaroids, and you even have to buy a special camera to use it — in this case, the iPhone. With it, I often take better photos on my iPad 2 than I do without my “proper” camera.

But it’s limited. There are third-party services that let you view Instagram images on Android or the web, but good luck getting your Mom to use those. There are also a whole lot of other ways to take and process pictures that offer more features than Instagram. Here are a few Instagram hacks.

Using a Better Camera.

The iPhone’s 5MP camera is great, with more than enough resolution for Instagram’s tiny 612 x 612 images. Even the iPad 2’s awful camera can handle this (although Apple’s weird anti-noise algorithms uglify the source picture something awful). But what if you want to shoot pictures with your grown-up camera and share those?

There are two ways, in the field. First is to use the Eye-Fi wireless SD card to beam photos direct from camera to iPhone or iPad. This is so clunky, so unreliable and so damn annoying to use that I’d recommend the second, (much cheaper) method. Instead of buying the $50 Eye-Fi, buy the $30 camera connection kit. You can then slip the SD card into your iPad, copy the photos you want to share and open them from within Instagram (you know you can use camera-roll photos in Instagram, right?)

The third way is to just wait until you’re at your computer, sync the photos to your iPhone in the usual way and go from there. This rather misses the point, though. The app is called Instagram, after all.

Using Helper Apps

Instagram has a range of filters and will even let you blur the image with a faux tilt-shift effect, but there are much more complex photo-editing apps for iOS. Any of these can be used to tweak a photo prior to opening it in Instagram, but a new app — Instaplus — is made to integrate directly with Instagram itself.

With Instaplus, you can take a photo from within the app, process it and send it off to Instagram. The camera section lets you zoom in, tap to focus and set exposure, and toggle the flash as well as the front and rear-facing cameras. The resulting (square) image is them sent to the processing section.

Some of these effects are named for those in Instagram, and are pretty much exactly these same. The difference is that you can also tweak brightness, contrast and saturation at any time, and there are also extra filters. These are very Instagrammatical, so if you want some real crazy filters, use something like Hipstamatic instead.

The next stage is framing. Unlike Instagram, Instaplus’ frames are separate from the filters, and there are many more of them.

Finally, just tap the button to share and export the picture direct to Instagram. This skips the several steps required to save to the camera roll and then import to Instagram.

It’s a great app, with one small fault: When you first take a photo, the initial processing is pretty slow. Instaplus is $2 in the App Store.

Sharing

Instagram comes ready to share with Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, Flickr and even Foursquare. But what if you want to put your photos somewhere else? Like, say, the brand-new Google Plus? It’s almost certain that Instagram will add G+ as an export option in the near future, but until then, here’s a workaround.

You’ll need a Dropbox account and Picasa, Google’s desktop photo-management software. You probably have both already. This hack has two stages. The first is to grab all of the photos you already have on Instagram and add them to G+. The next is to have all future photos automatically sent to a Google Plus photo album. I’ll explain them in reverse order, for clarity.

Syncing New Photos

First, you should link your Instagram account to your Dropbox. This is done with Instadrop, a web service which is ridiculously easy to use. Head over to Instadrop.appspot.com and click the buttons to authorize your Instagram and Dropbox accounts. If you are already logged in to these services, this will take seconds.

Now, take a photo and upload it to Instagram. Immediately, a new folder will appear inside your local Dropbox folder called “Instagram Photos.” Every time you take another Instagram pic, it’ll show up here.

Next, connect this folder to Picasa. From the File menu, pick “Add folder to Picasa.” Navigate to your new “Instagram Photos” folder and click OK. Now we need to tell Picasa to watch this folder for changes. Click Tools>Folder Manager in the menubar, find the “Instagram Photos” folder and set it to “Scan Always.”

Finally, right click on the folder back in the main Picasa window and set it to sync. This will send any new photos up to Google Plus on the web. Be sure to check the option to send original-sized images.

Upload Old Instagram Photos

Next, we want to grab all of our old photos and put them into this new synced folder. Head over to Instaport, a web service that will download all of your Instagram photos as a zip file. Connect it to your Instagram account, click export and wait. After a couple minutes the page will give you a download link.

When it has downloaded, unzip the photos and drag them to the folder in Picasa. That’s it. You just have to wait for the sync to finish.

Instagram is a very popular service, so it’s likely that somebody, somewhere has already put together a solution to your problem. But amongst all these hacks is the real point of Instagram: taking awesome photos and sharing them. To that end, try heading over to the Instagram blog. If you thought lo-fi, square, Lomo-fied photos couldn’t be art, then you have a treat in store.