Sharing photos is one of those everyday, most common actions on the iPhone that has got easier and easier as the iPhone and the App Store have developed. Apple has made things easier with features like multi-photo select in the Photos app, and many third party apps offer ways to send our pics all over the place in lots of slick ways.
PhotoScatter is one of the better recent entries that I’ve seen in this area. It’s a simple app (I’m a big fan of simple apps) with not a lot of bells and whistles as yet. It does not do a whole host of things, but it’s quite good at what it does – which is make it easy to simultaneously share a picture to several leading photo-sharing sites.
The sites you can currently share to from PhotoScatter are:
- Flickr
- PhotoBucket
- Shutterfly
- Picasa
Some things I like about PhotoScatter include:
It’s got a very simple UI, that matches it’s single-purpose focus in terms of what it does. When you first launch the app, you’ll need to setup whichever of the six services you want to use with it. I tested the three that are useful to me: Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Once you’ve got your setup done, each launch just presents you with 3 simple choices – to snap a new pic, choose an existing one from your photo library to share, or go back to the setup area to make adjustments / additions.
Once you’ve selected a photo and hit Share, you just choose which services to send it to via easy radio buttons (shown in the screencap at the top of this post). Once those are selected, there’s an option to add title and / or description text or just Submit straight away.
Once you hit Submit, the app shows you the progress as the pic hits each selected site.
The uploads are reasonably quick – the whole process is really super simple, and the app is just pleasant to work with because of its simplicity and neat UI.
There are a few things that are not in PhotoScatter, or that I’ve not come across anyway. The ability to share multiple pics at once is the most notable.
It also does not seem to include much information along with photos – on a quick Flickr test, it only showed a single tag (for its own name), no info on the device used to take the pic, or location info etc.
How useful PhotoScatter is for you is going to depend mostly on your own habits for sharing pictures. I tend to want to send a lot of batches of screencaps with apps I’m reviewing and so forth, so there are very good apps like Flickit (for batch upload to Flickr only) and CopyShare (for copying items quite quickly from iPhone to Mac) that serve me very well for that purpose.
I don’t have that many occasions when I want to share things to multiple photo / sharing services at once – but I think my usage is a little atypical in that respect.
If you regularly share photos to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or the other included services, and often want to share the same pic to multiple places – and you don’t need to do this in big batches – then this really looks a great app to have around.
You can find PhotoScatter in the App Store now, priced at $1.99
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It doesn't saw whether it does multiple pics at a time or not… like to a Flickr set or a Facebook gallery; now THAT would be cool.
There's no mutliple pics at once capability that I can see so far in the app.
Hey Patrick,
Multiple pics at once was something that we purposely left out of the initial version of this application.
First off, simplicity was our main goal for this app. There's A LOT of things we could have added to this app including multiple picture submission, but we wanted to make sure we got the UI perfect first.
Also, after many years in business for myself, I've realized one key aspect in the creation of any product … the market ALWAYS knows best.
PhotoScatter is going to change a lot in future version, but we are going to make sure that we hold onto it's simplicity.
If users (the market) really want multiple photo submissions at once, then we'll look into adding it.
This is by no means the 'complete' PhotoScatter. I'm sure we will make a lot of user-friendly updates in the future versions. (and maybe make some that aren't) … but we'll do our best to make PhotoScatter exactly, or as close to, what the market really wants …
I think we did OK on version 1 though … we're pretty happy with it!
Thanks for the review Patrick!
Have a good one,
Ryan
Hi Ryan – thanks very much for taking time to comment here. I had a feeling that leaving out a multiple pics upload option might have been an intentional thing, and that keeping it simple might have been the reason. I think that's a worthwhile approach, as it has paid off in terms of how nicely and simply executed the app is.
Have to agree with you that this is a very strong Version 1.0. I look forward to seeing what the market asks for and how the app develops.
Cool dude … I'll be sure to let you know when we update the app any.
Thanks again for the review!
I'm missing Expono (http://www.expono.com) on the list of supported services… Now THAT would be great! It has basically the same API as Flickr so it should be simple to implement it…
Put this feature request on the todo list Ryan!
API doc: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg3z7jnb_2d6bf6...
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