Instagram is the darling of tech, and the king of all photo apps. It made its founders millions of dollars, and made each of us into top artistic photographers with just our iPhone.

Or so the story goes.

What that simplistic narrative ignores though is that Instagram is being pushed very hard indeed, and its competitor is not another Silicon Valley darling, but  a European start-up called EyeEm.

EyeEm is a Berlin based company, founded in February 2011. Like Instagram it offers filtering, sharing, and discovery of photos. It has surged from being 232 most popular free video and photo app on Jan 12th, to being the sixth on Sunday evening:

During that space of time it has reached as high as second in the chart.

The rise  of EyeEm comes on the back of furore around changes to Instragram’s Terms of Service. Indeed EyeEm blogged the other day that they were committed to users owning their own images. The rise has all mostly happened through word of mouth, and was generally ignored by the tech press.

EyeEm’s co-founder Florian Meissner told Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher that a lot of the impetus had come from a surge of support from a specific high school in Texas and that they are “currently seeing sign ups a day in six figures”.  Apparently some users are actually posting screenshots of EyeEm onto Instragram and Twitter (on which they have doubled their number of followers)!