How to Share Photos With Glass — Ad-free Instagram Alternative for Apple

With a tagline like “Built for adoration instead of addiction,” one can’t help but be intrigued. A photography purist’s dream, Glass is a photo sharing platform and photography community that showcases photography, unfettered, plain and simple. And this tutorial will show you step-by-step how easy it is to use.

But first, to get you acquainted: The main attribute of Glass is its design. The platform is one beautiful stream of images, images, images—edge to edge. Literal eye candy for miles. It’s so image-focused, it doesn’t support full-screen videos, and feeds don’t include captions (you have to click on the image for caption access). Bellissima! Mille grazie!

As far as the down and dirty details: It’s for professional and amateur photographers alike, and you can download it on your iPhone, iPad, and the web. It’s a private, member-supported app (you do have to pay a small fee to use it), but it has no ads, no engagement algorithms, no invasive data tracking, outside investors, or public counts.

With full-screen layouts and minimal compression, images really sing on this app. Public profiles are beautiful enough to be used as portfolios. And because there are no likes and follower counts, you can forget all about engagement and that competitive stuff. Users can explore and discover photography organically.

More About Glass:

If you’re working in an app like Lightroom, or any other app that has an iOS Share Sheet, you can upload to Glass from there.
Images come with metadata with the technical details (camera, lens, aperture and shutter speed) and the date of capture.
You can share photos you posted on Twitter and elsewhere.
The feed is chronological, not based on an engagement algorithm.
You can enter up to three categories to describe your photograph by choosing from a carousel of options. Users can then search for images based on those categories.
It has an iPad app so that pictures can be viewed at a much larger dimension than phones allow for.

A Few Drawbacks:

It requires a membership fee of $4.99/month or $29.99/year (normally $49.99/year but lowered temporarily for the launch) with a free two-week trial.
Its app supports iOS only, with no Android option coming anytime soon.
The community seems small thus far.
It’s difficult to determine if people you know are on the platform.
There are no fun filters or other editing features within the app.

How to Share Images on Glass

You can check out Glass for free by signing up for a two-week trial. Once you do, follow these simple steps:

1. Click on the (+) at the bottom of the screen

2. Choose the image you want to upload from your phone or computer

3. Add a caption

Write any text you want to accompany your image in the Description box below the image.

4. Add a category

Glass allows users to discover photography by attributing them to categories.

You can select up to three categories to describe your image.

5. Upload your image

Tap the arrow in the upper right.

You will receive a notification that your image is being processed.

6. Success! Your image is posted

7. View your feed

Tap the two empty bars at the bottom.

You can now see your image in the feed.

8. Scroll to look at recently posted photography

Use the app to look at pictures.

9. Discover photographers

Click on the icon of the three people to discover other photographers using the platform.

10. Discover photography using categories

Toggle the top to Categories and find photography by subject matter.

Don’t Settle—Try Instagram Alternatives

Instagram might be the giant in the room, and as such, quite hard to avoid. But these days, there are enough alternatives looking to provide a platform expressly devoid of Instagram’s problematic features. Glass might cost you every month, but aside from the fact that the fee is quite small, wouldn’t it feel good to spend your hard earned money with a company that doesn’t answer to corporate investors? It’s like deciding to shop at the mom-and-pop store in your neighborhood instead of that gigantic online retailer you might have heard of that delivers goods in a day at crazy cheap prices. Tempting as it might be, put your money where your mouth is. Today, it’s as important as casting a vote.