The Two Best Apps for A Beautiful Instagram

Instagram is the "it" social platform these days, especially for bloggers and influencers since it is wonderfully engaging, easy to use, and easy to gain followers and extend your social reach. Even if you just use it for fun, it's always nice to have a thoughtful, curated feed of photos that really pop! In the past year I myself have come to rely heavily on Instagram as an extension of my blog and a way to gain exposure. There are several other apps and tools which I have have found super helpful in creating the best visually engaging Instagram feed, and I wanted to share my two favorites with you!

UNUM: I have come to rely heavily on this app, and it's hard to remember life without it! UNUM is an extremely helpful app for organizing the photos you plan on posting to your Instagram and seeing how they will all look together before you post them. It is super useful for maintaining a color scheme and making sure you are spacing out your outfit shots vs. close ups, food, and scenery shots. I love that I can plan my posts ahead of time and play around with where I want each photo to go and what order they look best in. You can also edit your photos right in the app, have captions ready to go with each image, and even see stats on which hashtags are getting the most results, and what times of day your posts get the most interaction. The only downside is that this app is for iPhone only (sorry everyone else!!). 

Lightroom: Can you believe the mobile app is totally free to download on your phone?! How amazing is that. I have wanted to download Lightroom onto my computer for ages, but the application is fairly expensive, so I was thrilled when I found out the iPhone app is free! It is extremely helpful with editing photos for my Instagram page -- in particular I love that you can adjust each color in a photo individually. I had previously become frustrated when I wanted to to saturate certain colors in a photo without saturating all of them (for instance saturate the foreground outfit colors but not the leafy green background!), and Lightroom enables this! After using several basic photo editing apps, Lightroom is a dream with the features it offers. It has become my go-to for editing color in my images, and I sometimes will even send photos from my computer over to my phone so I can edit the colors!

Now you know my secrets! Between UNUM and Lightroom I feel like I have been able to massively upgrade the quality of my Instagram photos and feed. Of course, taking good pics is an essential foundation to creating an visually appealing page (and I can't say that all my pics are perfect, but I give it a shot!), but having some helping hands in the process certainly can't hurt!
I also recently started using a follower-tracking app which shows you which of your followers are not following you back, who has unfollowed you, etc. and this info is super helpful if you are trying to boost your following and understand follow patterns. Between these few apps I feel like I have a much better approach to creating a beautiful Instagram feed with photos that represent my life and the things I love!

Check out my Insta @charlotteclaraxo!

What are your favorite apps? I'd love to hear in the comments!

xoxo, CC