Photo-sharing apps are hot right now – as seen by Facebook’s perhaps surprising acquisition of Instagram – but the photos that we lovingly tweak and share just tend to vanish into the ether, having a half-life of the attention span of the average web user. The gorgeous-looking Chinese-made app Photocus wants to give your photos a bit more longevity and usefulness by helping put them into groups that can be browsed easily.
That means your photos have more of a chance of sticking around and being associated with a certain place or object. Groups within the city-wide ones, as pictured above for Shenzhen, the city that’s home to Dingus, the startup that created Photocus. So you can create a specialized group within your city, say for “The Cutest Pet I’ve Ever Seen” or whatever takes your fancy.
Photocus has versions of its app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, which all look quite similar, using the large tiles mode of interface that was pioneered by Flipboard (and, by the way, we’re on Flipboard here). From the app you can share images to Facebook, Tencent Weibo, or Sina Weibo – which are also the third-party login options.
The app has location-based elements as well, with the possibility that it might help you connect with folks in your city who have similar interests, which is generally not seen with photo-sharing apps. The groups aspect to it resembles Pinterest, of course, except that Photocus offers a purer photographic experience, free of the Pinterest – and Pinterest clones – motivator of people trying to drive traffic to their own e-commerce stores.
After trying it out on my Android phone, I must say that Photocus is the most pleasant new app I’ve encountered from a Chinese startup this year (albeit ridiculously buggy in its Android iteration), making me feel that it had nicely refined and expanded the photo-sharing experience without in any way spoiling it. Yes, it is yet another photo app, but it’s not just another photo app.
Get Photocus via its homepage.
[Source: Showeb 2.0 - article in Chinese]