Tag Archives: event location

Does Albumatic have the friends photo album share figured out?

The iPhone has a camera, it has social solutions to post photos to and it many options to group photos and friends. The trick has been how to get all of the bits to come together in a way that is actually usable. Recently I was reminded of a early solution that allowed photos to be grouped by an event, it had it’s limitations around friend grouping along with a few other layout issues. In the world of apps, it was several years ago so the name has gone from my memory.

It seems everyone has made an attempt at providing a solution. Apps like Flock have ‘smarts’ built in around how and who should see the photos so there is less burden on the users. Other apps try gain usage through a unique interface for adding, sorting and viewing. It’s a huge challenge to find the magic sauce which will pull people in to use.

Albumatic is an app that has risen to being noticed not by setting new records in the number of our friends using it. Rather, in the area of the types and amount of investors that have jumped onboard to help the app grow. It’s strengths are the ability to build an album that others can be alerted to. They can then view and add their own images… which pretty much sounds like the marketing behind all of the other iPhone photo album sharing apps.

It appears from my first testing that if the album is location based, others can’t add photos without being close by. Other options are location based only by name and I ended up with pictures from other events. ‘Friends’ don’t have to be at the event to enjoy the photos, only to post (I like that). Those that are viewing (joined) the album are available via the app to the Album creator so it is easy to see who is watching along and who isn’t. Time will tell if Albumatic becomes the location photo album solution of choice. Once again, a free app that will have to pay the bills somehow once the VC money runs out, will it be location based ads?

Automating the sharing of iPhone photos amongst friends at the same event

There has been quite a few apps claiming they are going to make it easy to see events from many angles. Using ‘friends’, merging photos together into some sort of viewable group. Most have been strong on one or two features but not providing a complete solution. The other end of the solution is apps that track every move of you and your friends to encourage sharing… that is just plain creepy!!

I was disappointed with a couple options that let you share pictures if you knew in advance who was going to be there, request and they accepted your invite to a shared area, etc… Usually those people are standing right next to me at the event so what does the share do for me?!

The folks that do the Bump app, which handles transferring contacts and photos by bumping iPhones, are now taking a crack at filling the need for friend event photo sharing. The app, Flock, is an iPhone app that pulls together pictures your friends took at an event and puts them in a shared album.

The info on Flock states that you can use any app to take the pictures with, so it would appear it uses the EXIF info for time/location rather than having to do it’s own unique ID. The app does require you use your Facebook login as it’s login. Normally, this is just a way of letting Facebook handle the security of logins, but in this case it is how Flock knows who your ‘friends’ are.

When first launching Flock, your asked to allow the app to use Location Services. Like Bump, this means you have the location icon showing all of the time. With some apps, your battery goes down much quicker when something is constantly pinging the location, but Bump claims their apps are better at it and shouldn’t have a negative impact. The apps need to know your location in order to judge it against other users location. In the case of the Bump app, so you can transfer files, in the case of Flock so it knows when multiple users are at the same event.

Knowing where your at, that there are photos tagged with the time and location of the location, who your Facebook friends are, and if they were at the same location taking pictures, an album is created for you. Flock works in reverse too so if an event you took pictures at was also attended by a Facebook friend of yours, a push notification will let you know an album will be created from that event too. Of course, this does mean all of that information is sitting on a company’s servers to make the connection. How much of my every move being tracked by someone is worth the convenience of having a group photo album be created? Tough question that every individual has to answer for themselves.

It would be nice if something could be done with the collection of photos, Flock Album outside of just viewing in the app and relying on Flock to get your viewing pleasure right. A couple important positives… your photos are not shared with your friend’s Flock albums without you OKing it and they are not posted to Facebook automatically either (sharing a photo can not be undone though).