Ham­burg-based pho­to-shar­ing firm Tadaa appears to be cap­i­tal­iz­ing hand­some­ly on Instagram’s recent ToS woes, announc­ing that it has received trans­fers of more than 3 mil­lion pho­tos from the trou­bled Face­book acqui­si­tion just two weeks after adding an ‘Insta­gram import’ app.

Guar­an­teed to impress the job­bing social media man­ag­er, con­tent man­ag­er and com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er alike is anoth­er spin-off from the app. Tadaa has picked up no few­er than 500,000 new users dur­ing the same fort­night.  That takes the startup’s total user base to with­in a gnat’s whisker of 2 mil­lion. Christ­mas presents just don’t get any bet­ter than this.

Unique attrac­tions

While the suc­cess has almost cer­tain­ly been buoyed by Instagram’s change of pri­va­cy pol­i­cy in Decem­ber (which imme­di­ate­ly aroused user anx­i­eties that their pho­tos would be shared com­mer­cial­ly with­out their con­sent), Tadaa insists that it has plen­ty of oth­er attrac­tions.  For one thing, its com­mu­ni­ty has access to a heav­i­ly “gam­i­fied” envi­ron­ment, inge­nious­ly “financed” by a vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy called “Tadaa dol­lars” which users are reward­ed with when­ev­er they receive a re-share, com­ment or like.

But the social fea­tures are the Ger­man firm’s real pay­dirt. You can re-post pho­tos (like Twitter’s re-Tweets), reply using pho­tos instead of texts, and take part in fre­quent Tadaa-staged com­pe­ti­tions (pre­sum­ably, it didn’t want to be out­done in this depart­ment by rivals like Eye­Em and its pho­to missions).

Fab­u­lous editing

The award for most addic­tive stand­out fea­ture, though — at least for those hard­core iPhone pho­tog­ra­phers (iPho­neo­g­ra­phers) out there — has to go to Tadaa’s free, built-in pho­to-edit­ing fea­tures. You don’t even need to join up in order to use the app for pho­to-edit­ing – and, boy, does it take edit­ing to a new lev­el. There are lit­er­al­ly dozens of frames and fil­ters to choose between, and the flag­ship HD Tilt Shift fea­ture is to die for. It mag­i­cal­ly alters the depth of the field after you’ve tak­en the shot. Gan­dalf couldn’t do better.

Sat­u­ra­tion, light­ing and con­trast can also be adjust­ed, and you can reach a longest edge upload res­o­lu­tion of 1600X. That’s about three times high­er than Tadaa’s near­est rivals, includ­ing Instagram.

OK, it’s not as sim­ple to use as Insta­gram. But hey, once you’ve got the hang of it you’ll find it hard to trav­el sec­ond class again.