To Combat Instagram, Facebook Plans to Add Photo Filters

If you can't buy them, beat them, is a popular motto in Silicon Valley and big companies like Google and Facebook often end up doing just that. Case in point, Instagram, which Facebook tried to acquire but was rejected, according to a report.

So Facebook did the next best thing and started working on building photo filters into its own apps, in an effort to compete with Instagram as a photo sharing destination, the New York Times says.

None of this is official, but it would hardly be surprising. Instagram has been going from strength to strength, gaining millions of users who share their always interesting phone camera pics with their friends.

The app's success spurred a number of copycats to show up and the photo-sharing app market is pretty crowded.

Instagram's main claim to fame is its use of filters, methods for altering the photos, which don't always look great, before publishing them.

There's nothing there that would entice a professional photographer, but for regular users snapping a pic with their phones and wanting to show it to their friends, it's a great addition.

Whether the filters are Instagram's secret sauce is debatable, but Facebook seems to think so, so it's baking filters, almost a dozen of them in the first batch, right into the site's photo section.

Not that it's the only one, Apple is said to be adding filters to the camera app in iOS 5.

These filters will probably be a good addition for Facebook's users, but they probably won't drive any of Instagram's users back to Facebook. But what they may do is stop Facebook users from switching to Instagram for their photo sharing needs, which is all that the social network needs to do at its size.