Is THIS the ultimate social media platform for artists? | Cara App review & guide
If you’ve participated in this year’s Plein Airpril challenge and followed BrushWarriors for prompts, you must have noticed they were partnering with Cara–Artist Social & Portfolio Platform.
Hmm, a social platform for artists. That sounds… intriguing.
If you’re, like me, tired of Instagram, Cara might have seemed like something you really want to try out and believe in. So, I created my account, and tested it out for a couple of days.
My goal was to answer these questions:
- Does it live up to my expectations?
- Is it good and unique enough to make me want to keep using it?
- Does the platform feel “alive” and can you really engage with people there?
I’ve provided the answers below, along with a bit of a simple guide into using the platform.
So, is Cara worth your time?
What is Cara?
Firstly, I want to introduce you to the platform, what it is, and how it functions. Even if you’ve already been using it, you might find some less obvious features listed below, so don’t skip.
The Cara app is a social networking platform designed specifically for artists and creative minds. It functions like a mix of Instagram and a portfolio website. It allows you to:
- Share posts with images and text
- Connect with other artists, fans, and industry peers,
- Discover new art and follow discussions
- Find art-related jobs.
One of the key features of Cara is its focus on protecting artists from AI. The app:
- SHOULD* filter out generative AI images (I’ll explain the “*” later).
- Doesn’t allow AI models to be trained on content uploaded to Cara.
- Cara automatically adds “NoAI” tags to uploads, unlike most platforms, to discourage AI from scraping artist content.
Cara is available for free, both as a mobile app and on a web browser.
That’s it for a general description. Let’s move on to answering: What’s unique about Cara?
Cara’s features
According Cara’s About page, here are the more or less unique features of the platform (some of them aren’t available as of mid-July 2024–I struck these through🥲):
- Social media feed & portfolio
- Custom home feed
- Bookmarks and albums
- Animated GIF covers
Multi-video and Sketchfab embeds- Custom crop for thumbnails & covers
- Side tab options
Automated AI image detection & filteringCara Glaze- Jobs board
I’ll discuss each of them in more detail below.
Social media feed & portfolio
Custom home feed
Your Home page looks quite standard: upper menu bar, feed, side bar. You can see what’s up with just the people you’re following (Following) or use the Home tab–and here’s when it gets interesting.
Click on the cogwheel icon, and you’ll be able to customize your Home feed. You can split the percentage of what you see between People You Follow, Your Follow’s Network, and Cara Site Wide.
So, if you want to keep your Feed limited to just the people you follow, assign a big % to the People You Follow option and set No to Hide reposts in “Following”. If you want it to be more of an exploration, choose Yes and play with Your Follow’s Network and Cara Site Wide.
It’s worth noticing the Ratio only affects how many additional posts you’ll see from outside your follows (and you can’t hide the posts from people you follow, which makes perfect sense).
Bookmarks and albums
Bookmark is a pretty standard feature you know from Instagram. It allows you to save posts and group them into albums. As of now (July 2024) you can only create private albums (they only inform you about this in Car’s mobile app, though). You can access your bookmarks by clicking your profile picture in the upper right corner.
Animated GIF covers
Another small and nice gimmick. You can upload GIFs, and they will be automatically played in loops when you view it in a portfolio view.
Multi-video and Sketchfab embeds
That’s the Cara feature that’s unavailable now. In theory it should let you post multiple videos from urls (for example, from YouTube) and embeds (models from Sketchfab, for example, I guess?).
Unfortunately, when you click Post and then click the video icon, you see the message: The video embed feature for web is currently unavailable while we work on a fix.
Custom crop for thumbnails & covers
One more small but cool feature. When uploading an image, you can adjust its thumbnail. Not revolutionary, but it’s a nice customization option if you want your profile to look a specific way.
However, your image crop edits won’t work once you’ve published your work and wanted to alter it after this. And it doesn’t work for GIFs, apparently.
Side tab
In your Homepage view, there’s a side tab on the right. It consists of 4 elements:
- Latest discussions
- Open talk đź«€
- Latest
- Artwork categories
Latest discussions are, as I understand, the latest comments on posts across the entire Cara platform, not just your follows or their networks. To me it’s rather meh as these are basically just things people comment under people’s posts–and you don’t even know these people! Of course, you can discover new artworks this way, but still–I could do without it.
Open talk is probably my favorite part of Cara right now, as I was craving real-people discussions on art-related topics, and I got it. The module shows no-image posts centered around discussing a given topic. It reminds me of Threads or X posts.
Latest shows the latest posts tagged with a given hashtag (e.g. #dragons, #WIP, #props etc). Similar to Instagram’s tag pages. Artwork categories lets you browse through posts under a given Cara’s category. These two things are pretty similar. What I like about them is that you can filter the results by medium, software, post type etc.
AI detection
Now, I understand this and you need to understand it too that Cara is a startup in its beta mode.
Beta refers to a product’s testing phase with real users before it’s officially launched. The word testing is key here.
I believe Cara’s team is checking which features users are most interested in, but they haven’t developed them yet. (I guess they might be, for example, using the “button-to-nowhere” testing method with the “add video to you post” option. The functionality doesn’t work, as I’ve mentioned earlier, but they might be measuring the number of times people click the “video” icon when trying to upload a video and this way they know if we’re interested in it.) And, since it’s beta, not everything works perfectly well. Yep, Cara is buggy sometimes, and you’ll also see below how buggy it is about the AI detection trick.
In their Introducing Cara’s Features article, we can read:
Want to see human-made art? We have an AI detector that automatically filters and rejects AI-generated images from portfolios. If you’re looking for human creatives, Cara is the place to be.
The problem is this feature… doesn’t work (?) At least it didn’t work in my case, as I’ll explain in a sec.
How I tested Cara’s AI detector
- I generated an image of a kawaii pig using Microsoft Copilot.
- I published it as a regular post (not a portfolio one). Nothing happened, and I managed to post it. That’s okay; in the quote I above you can read they talk about AI filtering only in the context of portfolios.
- Then, I published it as a portfolio post. The system showed me a reminder that Cara does not accept AI-generated images in portfolios but if there’s no AI in it I can publish my image–which I did, despite the fact it was fully AI.
Maybe I understood something wrong, but I thought the system would not let me publish the image at all. However, it turns out you can publish AI stuff there anyway (?)
I removed the picture from my profile (I don’t want this type of stuff there) but you can see on the screenshots everything I described above really happened.
Cara Glaze
Glaze is a system that affects the way AI processes your images by shifting things on a pixel level so that artificial intelligence can’t train your style. Cara partners with Glaze to let their users glaze the images they upload on the platform.
Unfortunately, again, the feature isn’t currently available: Cara Glaze is temporarily disabled due to an abuse incident. The team is currently working overtime to solve server issues due to increased traffic. We will reenable Cara Glaze soon once a solution is ready. Thank you for your patience.
You can read more about how this works in Cara’s post Introducing: Cara Glaze.
Jobs board
Pretty straightforward: you can browse art-related jobs using the Jobs board function.
It seems pretty nice and solid. It’s hard to say for sure, though. The feature is not for me, as I’m not thinking seriously about getting into the VFX industry, and the job offers there seem pretty serious. But, still, nice to have, I guess.
User feedback. How would I improve The Cara App?
In this paragraph, I gathered the problems I stumbled upon as a self-taught amateur artist along with my proposed solutions. It would be more than perfect if Cara was indeed the app that can address them in the future.
Suggestion #1. Forum
I think Cara can be my go-to place for art (and not only)-related discussions.
I do like the Open talk feature, but I wish it could get extended. Right now, everything that shows up there is quite random and limited. You can click View more and you get a few more discussion threads, but that’s all. It would be great if we could get something more of a Reddit-like forum maybe, with threads and categories. Yeah, basically, a forum would be great.
Suggestion #2. Article-like posts
If Cara was just about posting artworks, getting likes, and comments like “Love it 🩷”, I would quit it a long time ago, but it’s the real community vibe that’s holding me there. I wish Cara would become more of a knowledge-sharing place where users can write longer article-like posts. I don’t need more space for that–5000 characters that’s available right now is great–but more options, like interlacing text with images (when you want to write a step-by-step tutorial, for example), text with anchors, and maybe some headings (h2, h3?) would be really cool.
Suggestion #3. Polls & surveys
Polls and surveys (as we know them from Instagram Stories) would be great.
Cara: App Review. Summary
I think the best summary will be answering the questions I posed at the beginning of this text:
- Did Cara live up to my expectations?
I think I can say “yes”. And I really want to see how the platform is going to grow. - Does the platform feel “alive” and can you really engage with people there?
Yes! That’s the best part of it. With Instagram, publishing an artwork felt like sending it into a void. At Cara, people are actually responding to your art and discussing things. It also feels more cozy. - Is it good and unique enough to make me want to keep using it?
Yes.
I think there’s a massive potential in Cara, and I do hope it will not only survive in the months to come–but actually thrive.
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