BeFunky's goal is bigger than just to be a good mobile-and-Web photo editor/enhancer: The company wants to create a new, automated way for you to organize and find your photos and those of others, whether you're at a computer's browser or off somewhere with your mobile device. Unlike Instagram, each BeFunky entry point gets full citizenship, so, you can edit and upload photos in the browser as well as in the app. Like Instagram, there are filters and social discovery, but it's more organized, with categories for photo types, such as nature, pets, faces, and so on. Unfortunately, the app and service don't deliver its goals of editing plus discovery as well as the competition.

Getting Started with BeFunky
You can start with BeFunky either by installing the app from the iTunes Store or signing up on the web. Versions are available for iPad and Android as well as iPhone. Doing the latter is streamlined if you simply click the big blue button that uses a certain social network. This requires access to your public profile, friend list, email address, birthday, status updates, photos and your friends' photos. It also requests the ability to post publicly on your behalf, but given BeFunky's purpose, that makes sense. Once you've clicked the two OKs, you've got yourself a fully functional BeFunky page and account. The default profile description is cute: "One magical day a unicorn handed me a camera and showed me BeFunky. The rest is history." 

Interface
The app's Home screen features two large buttons on top: Camera, and Camera Roll. Above this, a Settings gear and a smaller Create button, which you can't use unless you've selected a photo. I'm not sure why this button is even on the home screen, since you can't have a photo selected there. But the largest part of the screen is dedicated to photo thumbnails for categories like Nature, Pets, Love, and Tattoo. Along the bottom are five more buttons, in addition to Home, we get Profile, Explore, My Stream, and Activity. It seems like a couple of these are redundant, and could have been eliminated to make room for the standard Camera icon for shooting pictures that you find in most photo apps.

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Editing and Enhancing Photos

For shooting pictures, the app uses the built in iPhone Camera app, so you don't get anything in the way of  extras like separate focus and exposure points. Befunky has a lot more basic photo editing tools than Instagram, including white balance, leveling, fill light, and sharpening. These offer the Snapseed-like swiping gestures to increase and decrease the effects. But these work in an unusual way: You have to hit the Check mark icon once you're happy with an edit, otherwise it will be lost when you swipe over to apply another. There's an Undo arrow, that shows a small thumbnail showing each edit step, rather than actually undoing your last action. At first I found this process odd, but then it seemed to make sense.

Next come the effect filters. Unlike a lot of photo apps that use funky names for these, BeFunky welcomely uses straightforward descriptive names like Cross Process, Instant, and Lomo. I also like how the illustrative thumbnail for each effect shows your actual photo, rather than a sample image like Instagram's balloon. I counted 29 filters in the free app, with a lot of eye-catching choices like Pop Art, Sketch, and Holga. You can purchase even more in categories like Instant, Old Photo, and Duotone for 99 cents each. Alternatively, you can buy the whole set of 65 effects in the form of BeFunky Pro, for $1.99, a seemingly better value.

Borders and frames are a similar deal: You get plenty to choose from in the app, but if those don't meet your visual desires, you can purchase more.

The text feature is something with no equivalent in Instagram. You can choose from six fonts, many background colors (or transparent background over your image), and coolest of all, you can rotate your text on three axes! Happily, you're not restricted to square output, as you are in Instagram.