INSTAGRAM Instagram is a free, online photo-sharing application and social network platform that was acquired by Facebook in 2012. Instagram was founded in 2010 by Stanford grads Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Instagram allows users to edit and upload photos and short videos through a mobile app . Users can add a caption to each of their posts and use hashtags and location-based geotags to index these posts and make them searchable by other users within the app. Each post by a user appears on their followers' Instagram feeds and can also be viewed by the public when tagged using hashtags or geotags. Users also have the option of making their profile private so that only their followers can view their posts. The United States, Japan, and Brazil are the three countries with the most users of Instagram. In 2014 16 billion photos have been uploaded to Instagram.