Instagram Refreshes App by Including Photo Maps

The photo map feature in the new version of Instagram’s app.

Instagram may be waiting for its billion-dollar sale to Facebook to be finalized, but the company is not resting on its laurels. The company, working out of offices in San Francisco, continues to crank out updates to its popular photo-sharing application.

On Thursday, it rolled out the third version of its application. The update makes several improvements, including refreshing the look of profiles, smoothing out performance bugs and allowing users to mark comments as spam. But its main focus is the addition of a photo map that lets members plot their Instagram pictures on an interactive world map.

“If the last version was all about production and taking the perfect picture, then this version is really about new ways of browsing,” said Kevin Systrom, chief executive and one of the founders of the company. “You can explore photographs, not just in a chronological order, but in geography.”

The new features won’t automatically chart a user’s entire backlog of photographs across a map. Instead, it will scan for photographs that are already tagged with geographical data and let users decide whether or not to plot them. Instagram users can look through the photo maps of their friends and other users, and each time an Instagram user uploads a photograph to the service, it will ask them whether or not they want to add the photograph to the map.

Mr. Systrom hopes that the new features will warm users to the idea of adding geographical data to their pictures.

“We want to make it clear what geotagging is and show how it lets you curate your archive on a map,” said Mr. Systrom.

Currently, only 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users add their location to photographs. Someday the company hopes to offer the ability for users to see all of the images uploaded to Instagram around a certain location or event.

“If people produce more geo-data and understand how its being used, we can do more with it,” said Mr. Systrom. “Wouldn’t you want to look at the London Olympics as it happens on Instagram?”

Instagram now has upward of 80 million users and 4 billion photos in its system. And still, the service is “growing quickly,” said Mr. Systrom. He said the company has had little to no contact with Facebook regarding the latest version of its application.

“We’re independent until they say its O.K. to start collaborating,” he said. “We’re waiting on them to give us the green light.”