Create and Share Photo Stories with Mooklet

We’ve written quite a bit about Japanese photo sharing apps recently. And I’ve just had an opportunity to preview another interesting one, although its primary focus is not on photo taking (although you can use the camera from in the app) but rather on photo sharing.

Mooklet (Mooklet.in) is an iPhone app that let’s you assemble photo books from the pictures you have taken, and from there you can share those books with others. I took it for a spin and created a photo collection with some sumo pictures I had taken recently. And the books do look very cool. You can add text along with your pictures, describing what’s going on in as much or as little depth as you want.

Once you have finished, you can then publish your book to one of your three free online book slots. If you want to add more slots you have to pay [1]. At first, I couldn’t really envision a scenario where I would pay for such a service. I mean, I recently tried the new iPhoto for iOS, and its photo journals can be published to iCloud and shared in a similar manner. I asked the Mooklet’s founder Toru Kobayashi why someone would pay for a solution like this instead of something like iPhone for iOS. He explained:

iPhoto Journals is a very good service. It is similar with Mooklet in offering a more rich experience than the usual photograph sharing services. […] Some people are satisfied with such a easy sharing and good looking service. On the other hand, there are those who cannot be satisfied. [A very important part] of Mooklet is the message and story. It is creative work to make a Mooklet.

Mooklet Cover. I forgot to add my name!

And he has a point. Mooklet is for creating and sharing photo stories, rather than just photo albums. Toru adds that there are a large number of people who enjoy creating such works. In a way, it’s almost like the photo book creation tool for iPhoto in OS X, but in digital form. You can preview some photo books from the apps beta testers here, here, and here.

The books themselves are pretty slick once published, with pages of photos and text that you can flip through often with some animated transitions added. There are some downfalls however. The photo stories, once published to the web, can only be viewed in mobile Safari. So if you want to share with someone who isn’t on an iPhone or iPad, they’re hung out to dry. Toru notes that Mooklets are best experienced in full screen and with the ability to flip through them with your fingers. Indeed Mooklet appears to be an app that you will use to show friends on your own device, as it comes with a function to save your favorite photo books to your home screen for quick access.

I’m told that so far Mooklet is a self-funded, four-person team. The app has just been approved for the app store and will be available in a few days on June 4. It has already been chosen as one of 16 finalists in the 2012 App Star Awards, which certainly makes for a promising outlook before Mooklet becomes public. We certainly wish Toru and his team good luck!