It's Filter-ific: Photobucket Offers Mobile Photo Filter App

Photobucket today is launching Snapbucket, a photo-sharing app for Android and iOS. The app expands on photo-altering filters popularized by Hipstamatic and Instagram, offering 9,500 total filters, including customizable ones and advanced options that are unlocked through participation.

(The Android version should be available this morning, while the iOS one may still be awaiting Apple’s approval when this story goes live.)

Photobucket, which gained fame as a photo-uploading companion to Myspace, was bought by the social network in 2007, and was sold by parent company News Corp. to Ontela in 2009. (News Corp. also owns All Things D.)

Lately, the company has found a new crop of users on mobile devices, particularly Android, for which it offers an auto-upload tool (the iPhone requires a user to consent to upload a photo). Photobucket has 15 million mobile users and four million photos and videos uploaded from phones per day.

The company now plans to ramp up its releases and make additional acquisitions, said CEO Tom Munro in an interview.

“It was probably harder for Photobucket to disengage from News Corp. and become a viable standalone entity than anyone had anticipated,” Munro said. “But now we change our focus from maintaining to being innovative.”

Mobile photo filters do seem more copycat than innovative, but we’ll see what comes next.