Facebook has released a dedicated camera app that’s designed to make it faster and easier to upload photos to the social network in addition to editing your pics and browsing those uploaded by your friends.

When a user opens Camera, they will see a stream of photos uploaded by their friends and family. Swiping side to side reveals more photos while tapping a picture enlarges it.

The app also allows users to upload multiple photos at once instead of having to load each image individually. The procedure should be familiar to Apple users; simply tap to checkmark the photos you want to upload from your album. There are options to tag friends and add captions before mass sharing.

The company has also included some basic editing features such as the ability to crop, rotate and select from up to 15 filter effects.

Contrary to what you might expect, the app doesn’t use any features from Instagram as that deal has not yet been finalized. As such, the timing and decision to release Facebook Camera seems a bit unusual as one would think it’d be best to wait and implement features from that acquisition into a dedicate camera app.

Facebook Camera is available now in the App Store for Apple’s iPhone (3GS and higher), iPad (except the first-gen model) and the fourth generation iPod touch free of charge. No word yet on if there is an Android version in the pipeline but we can’t imagine why there wouldn’t be.