Kolkata, Jan 7 (IANS): Photo and video sharing app Instagram, which launched its maiden photography exhibition in India here on Thursday, is mulling "going deeper" in West Bengal and use this event as a template for going national, said an official.

Themed "Bengal's Diversity in Pictures", the assemblage features photographs crowdsourced from a group of 17 individuals from Kolkata spanning various age groups and professional backgrounds.

"We selected Kolkata based on two major factors: how engaged the community was and the diversity. The city has a multi-layered diversity and a lot of texture in terms of history and culture," Facebook's public policy director, India, South & Central Asia, Ankhi Das told IANS at the inaugural here.

Running at the ICCR gallery, the three-day exhibition conveys multiple facets of life unique to the state of Bengal, including its rural-urban contrasts.

Instagram, owned by social media giant Facebook, worked with the local community - Instagram Calcutta (@ig_calcutta) - to curate images which reflected the theme.

Das said officials are thrashing out how to take the exhibition forward.

"This will be a template in terms of going national so we are going to take learnings from here in terms of what we are going to do better. There are two strands of thought we are discussing about: How deep do we go in a particular state and figure out what are the important moments in different states and cities come up with a plan which kind of talks to the theme of diversity," said Das.

"One path is if the community is really strong then do we go deeper in the state maybe Durgapur, Asansol... " she said.

The visual story-telling platform has around 400 million users all over the world and 80 million photos are posted on the app every day.