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According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is about to unveil an upgraded iCloud service at WWDC in June. Citing the usual sources “familiar with the matter,” the report also claimed the features would include new photo-sharing capabilities for sharing and commenting on sets of photos. It also mentioned the ability to sync video to iCloud, which sounds a lot like a Video Stream feature that we mentioned last year. Perhaps this is the reason Phil Schiller no longer needed Instagram?

The new features, expected to be announced at Apple’s world-wide developer conference beginning June 11, will allow iCloud users to share sets of photos with other iCloud users and to comment on them, these people said… Apple is trying to better compete in the red-hot market for photo sharing, dominated by fast-growing online services such as Facebook Inc. and mobile apps like Instagram—which Facebook has agreed to acquire for $1 billion.

We revealed last September that Apple was readying its Find My Friends network. At the time, we reported references to video streams that indicated Apple was likely considering a video syncing/stream feature similar to Photo Stream.

According to the report, Apple is “rolling out new features cautiously” as it worries about the cost of storing large amounts of data, but is also considering increasing the maximum number of photos and albums users can store:
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Face.com’s facial recognition iPhone app, KLIK, just released version 1.0 today with filters and a new learning mode.

The app’s previous “testing” version, as Face.com’s co-founder and CEO Gil Hirsch described it to 9to5Mac exclusively, debuted in January. However, the latest flavor exhibits face-friendly filters akin to Instagram and improved recognition capabilities that also Facebook-tags people, while remembering those features for future occurrences in case the social network cannot (some Facebook users’ privacy settings do not allow for photo-tagging).

“We looked at the photos people were taking and chose filters suitable for people’s pictures,” explained Hirsch to 9to5Mac. “Our filters are face-friendly.”

Hirsch detailed how KLIK’s artistic filters compliment faces due to their subtle colors and saturations, while other apps’ filters are more generalized for pictures of animals or objects and are often too harsh. Meanwhile, the face-learning software not only tags friends in images, but it quickly trains itself to remember them. The team behind KLIK noticed Facebook users do a lot of uploading, but not much tagging, and that decreases the amount of sharing. Therefore, the facial recognition may not always be on par, but the app’s new learning mode quickly corrects this lapse.

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Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey is not the only photo-loving business executive upset by Instagram in recent weeks. While Dorsey stopped posting photos on Instagram after Facebook reportedly beat his Twitter to an acquisition of the app, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller quit Instagram for another reason: Android.

A reader noticed Schiller deleted his Instagram account (@schiller), and then reached out to Apple’s most visible public speaker by Twitter for confirmation. Schiller told the reader that he quit the rising photo-based social network, because the app “jumped the shark” when it launched on the Android platform.

In terms of iOS marketing, which is something that Schiller runs at the highest level, Instagram could have been seen as a pull for smartphone buyers to the iOS platform. The fun, convenient, and growing network was featured several times in Apple’s App Store—even winning “App of the Year” recognition. As marketing chief at Apple, seeing one of the platform’s most popular third-party pieces of software running on millions of Android phones is a disappointing sight.

Update: 9to5mac reader Clayton got in touch (we verified headers) with SVP Schiller who clarified his position… a little:

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O.K., here is another Instagram story, but now its about the iOS app landing the No. 1 free app spot in the App Store for the first time—despite much media attention on the subject of it selling out to Facebook.

Hipsters everywhere donning their skinny jeans took to Twitter to post one last heavily filtered image, while threatening to delete their Instagram accounts after news broke earlier this week that social network giant Facebook bought the app for a cool $1 billion.

Many tweets and reports even detailed how to keep Instagram photos from Mark Zuckerberg’s acquisitive hands through export services like Instaport.me that essentially leave users free and clear to erase the Instagram app from their smartphones.

The public’s warning now seems empty, of course, as Instagram itself used Twitter this morning to announce its sudden surge in popularity. It looks as though the intense press scrutiny only encouraged the iOS app to soar up the charts. Meanwhile, its new parent company does not even sit in the top 25 free apps in Apple’s App Store.

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/instagram/statuses/189845445458132992]

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Instagram, Apple’s 2011 “App of the Year,” just released an update to its iOS application that includes a sleek user interface, tappable notifications, a new filter, and an enhancement feature.

The app is a free photo-manipulator that allows users to snap pictures, apply hip vintage filters, and then share their edited images through a built-in social network. Users can also share their creations through other services, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr.

The newest version allots a much-needed facelift and provides a more modern appearance than the previous variant by displaying an overhauled header and menu buttons (as seen in the image to the right).

“We’ve simplified the look of Instagram,” announced the San Francisco-based Company in a blog post.

Perhaps most important: Instagram now asks users if it is O.K. to upload contacts to its servers—not wanting to become the next Path.

More screenshots are available below.

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Instagram has released a huge update today with Version 2.0 in what they’re calling one of the “largest revamps” to the app’s core camera technology since it launched. Along with a UI overhaul, the app now supports images with a resolution up to 1936×1936 on the iPhone 4 (in your camera roll, not on Instagram), in comparison to the 612×612 prior to the update.

As part of a brand new camera UI, the most impressive feature is the new “live filters”. They’ve taken the old filters and rewritten them to be “200x faster”, allowing you to instantly apply effects in real-time within the camera UI. The image above shows off the new UI, but you can go here to learn exactly how all the new elements work. Oh, and you can also now enable and disable borders on every filter.

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