Barros Technologies has launched an iPhone photo app that lets users “edit”, tag and share pictures on social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Picasa and Flickr. When they say “edit”, they mean adding text boxes, clip-art and comments. But do you honestly want more than that?
All right, NetPhoto lets iPhone users choose from 200 “fun” clip-arts like hats, glasses, facial expressions and speech bubbles. Once that’s done, the pics can be uploaded to Facebook, MySpace, Picasa or MySpace pages. While it’s currently only available for iPhone, Barros is now working to get BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian smartphones on there. NetPhoto costs £2.99 UKP/ $4.99 USD on the iPhone store.
From the release:
John Caine, MBE and Executive Chairman of Barros Technologies, said: “More and more people are accessing social networking services from their mobile devices as they want to remain connected to their social network while on the move. We wanted to provide them with same richness of photo-editing and sharing functionality on their mobile device as they currently enjoy from their laptop or PC.”
What we think?
Ooh, so close! I’ve been seeing a lot of photo-sharing apps being released lately that have been trying to tap social networking. They’ve all had little differences, and while NetPhoto is closest to being the best one I’ve seen, it still has a few fatal flaws. What are the major recent releases in this Social Mobile Photo-Sharing category? There’s the Photobucket service, which offers good actual photo-editing functions – but it only works for Photobucket users, so it’s not useful in a larger social networking sense. SendPhotos has an even better suite of editing features AND it’s free. But it only uploads to the SendPhoto website, so it’s still limited. Then there’s LiveFromYou, which combines LBS with Facebook and MySpace widgets. Up until today I would have said that was the best. So why do I think NetPhoto is superior? Because of it’s lack of features.
It’s an incredibly bare-bones service. There’s no nonsense – you don’t need to adjust levels or tweak settings. You just slap a caption on there and upload it to one of four different photo-sharing services (the most I’ve seen on any of these services so far). In terms of popular use, being able to add a caption is the only function most people want. Just look at lolcats. The two big problems with this service? First, it doesn’t have enough social networks to upload to. The more ubiquitous a service like this is, the better. Second, it’s not a free download. You want to drop-kick your downloads into a pit, then charge for your app. For a slim, simply service like this, ad-support really is the only way to go.
Thanks for your analysis of NetPhoto, The team here at Barros has developed the app to allow users to simply and easily edit, share and post their photos: with more versions and other apps to follow. With regards to the social networking sites users can upload to, we incorporated user feedback and designed NetPhoto to initially cover the major social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, Picasa and Flickr. We’d be keen to gather any further user feedback on other sites users would like in any subsequent versions.
John Caine, Barros Technologies
http://www.barrostechnology.com