Above are two of my cats in a photo I took on January 7.

Beavis is the striped tabby. He's 18 and sick; soon he will die.

Coco is the tuxedo cat. She's young and restless.

This morning the two of them were in a beautiful pose.

So I opened my Instagram app and took a picture. It was perfect.

As I was browsing the filters, the Instagram app crashed and I lost my photo, which had not been saved on the camera roll.

I tried to launch Instagram again, but Coco ran away.

I had lost the moment, and it was never coming back.

Instagram does not save the picture when you click to take the picture.

I've been sad all day about losing that image.

In the future, I will use a different camera app to make photos so I never again lose a perfect picture.

Instagram, it only needs to happen once for you to lose a customer for life.

You don't know what you got, till it's gone.

P.S. -- Tuxedo cat runs around so much that if you miss her in a pose, you may never get her in that pose again. So from now on, I'm using a camera app that does not crash, and saves to the Camera Roll first thing after I snap the picture.

And Beavis, I will treasure every moment I have left with you.

:( .. sad Adam.. we lost our kitty last month - he was 15 ... our memories are precious x

Sorry to hear that, Louise.

Photos, like memories, are precious.

I will do my best not to lose them.

It's tough to lose a member of the family. I've been dealing with the issues of an aging pet this year:

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-dog-is-dying.html

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2012/04/letting-go.html

Thank you Chris. I take comfort in your words:

Once you can't use uncertainty to hide from death, the best course of action is to live well.

Don replied, "That's what friends do. You've listened to me talk about my cancer for hours; the least I can do is stay with you now." It was a great comfort.

We're all fighting a losing battle with death, and the outcome is always the same. What matters is what you do along the way.

You reminded me of how different the Singularity people are.

They truly believe they can live much longer.

I haven't given up all hope of immortality, but it seems a low-probability result.

My fallback position is to write so much that people can reconstruct my personality just from the millions of words I've written!

That begs the question of what we are besides a bunch of memories and a personality.

There's something more than that, right?

Rule #1 never take photos with Instagram.. always use the camera app and use then Instagram later :)

Am I the only one who didn't know this rule? Consider me a convert.

instagram should actually promote that activity...people love the filters, not taking photos with instagram

agreed tom. i usually use the camera in the lock screen to open camera and take a photo, and then throw it to one of the photo sharing and editing services afterwards.

what would be super cool is if apple let you take the picture, and then from the camera app itself, allow you to get to instagram (or your photo app of choice) to edit your photo and then share it...sharing is way better on the other services than the iphone camera app.

Thanks for the tip! From now on I use the camera on the lock screen as you do.

18 months later I still use Tom's tip. Always use the camera app for photo taking.