【Russia】

Prisma,Russia the mobile app that turns your photos into artworks through neural-network magic, has received what its founders call the biggest update so far.

Originally focused on taking photos, applying filters to them and sharing them on other social networks, Prisma is now a social network in its own right.

The Camera part of the app is now joined by Profile and Feed tabs. While Profile is self-explanatory, the Feed offers a list of trending images, and it works a little different than other social feeds.

"A shared artwork an only be seen by people nearby. Every like spreads the post further increasing its range of appearing on people’s feed. Theoretically, a user can post a picture, get likes and watch his or her post spread and cover the whole world," Prisma explains in its press release.

You can also see photos from the people you follow, most recent photos, or tap on a location to see more photos taken near that location. Prisma also mentions an interactive map, but the only way to get to it (in the beta version of the app I was testing) was looking at one of my own photos and tapping on the map icon in the lower right corner.

There are other improvements. The resolution of the photos has been doubled. Finally, the iOS version of the app now has adjustable aspect ratio as well as a full-screen camera mode.

The app as I tested it works well, but it's still a bit rough around the edges. Likely due to the small number of users in the beta, trending images haven't changed in a week. Also, the UI could use some tweaking; it was sometimes hard for me to find a particular feature; and the map, which is now mostly barren, would be more useful if you could actually find photos on it, instead of merely likes of your own photos.

On the upside, the Feed is a great way to find cool Prisma images; practically everything you snap on Prisma can be made into a beautiful-looking image, and I enjoyed scrolling through other people's creations, even with a very limited selection.

As always, the seemingly never-resting Prisma team has a ton of upcoming upgrades lined up. These include offline video processing and free aspect ratio mode to Android, improving filter quality, and further improvements to the Feed.

The new Prisma is available now on iOS and Android.