Can Shoto Really Convince Your Friends to Upload Photos?

These days, when you hear about a new photo sharing social platform, the first instinct is to yawn, and wonder if it's 2013 again, when, in the wake of Instagram's sale to Facebook, a year later we were over-run by photo sharing social networks.

Shoto wants to solve the problem of sharing photos between friends by creating secure shared albums from events, holidays, and so on. The idea is that all of us take dozens of pictures, but most of these photos will not get uploaded to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. After that, if you're looking for any photos from an outing, you're left chasing your friends to upload the photos you want.

Started by San Francisco-based Sachin Dev Duggal, Shoto (available free on Android and iOS) automatically collects metadata from the photos on your phone - and those of other app users in your contacts - to work out the time, date, and location of photos, and figure out if other people you know were nearby when you were taking any photos - and if they have photos that are different from yours, then it will try and get you to share the pictures with each other too. But surely getting your friends to form a shared album using Google Photos or Facebook isn't that hard a task, is it?

"For people who want to share images and albums, there are lots of tools available," concedes Duggal, "they will do it. But most people aren't actually doing that, as we discovered."

Duggal blames the ubiquitous likes on Facebook for this: "when you share an image publicly, you will get dozens of likes, and each of those gives you a bit of a dopamine rush," he says. "But when you're sharing images privately with your friends, what will you get out of it?"

Since sharing photos with friends won't give you that same addictive buzz - Duggal believes - that the workaround to get you to actually share data is to trigger the sense of anxiety instead. Leaving aside the chemical addiction talk, what this basically means is that Shoto also looks at the metadata of photos that all your friends have taken, and if someone was at an event where you were also taking pictures, it informs you about it.

"It'll tell you, 'Gopal, Sachin has a dozen photos of this party you were at that you don't,' and then," explains Duggal, "you'll get the anxiety stimulus, because now you want something that your friend has. And the way you can access these photos is by sharing your own pictures from the same event. So the photos are like a currency."

It's an interesting idea, tied in to Shoto's new Album Swap feature - Shoto launched in September with a focus on automatically organising your images; with the new feature, it takes on sharing as well. Of course, the first concern that any app like this raises is about the security and privacy of your images.

"We don't actually upload the photos for comparison," clarifies Duggal. "We use a lot of metadata, which actually allows a lot of the work to be done very quickly, and then we fine tune it using a measure called image density."

"To do this, a calculation is done on the image, that generates a checksum, and this is done entirely on your device," he adds. "So your photo stays with you. We just upload the checksum to see if anyone else has the same images, and if you have friends who were taking pictures at the same event you were at, and your pictures are unique, then we'll tell them about it, so they will want to share their pictures with you."

Images are then finally uploaded - but this is a fully manual process. People typically upload all their images anyway, but making it manual adds a level of comfort with the app, says Duggal. "We started off with it being fully automated, but people found it a little creepy," he adds.

It's an interesting concept, and what makes Shoto particularly compelling is that it's not dependent on your friends having installed the app. You sign up with your social accounts as well, and Shoto then searches through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to find photos from your friends.

You can also create events - like a concert for example - in your Shoto album, and the app uses hashtags to identify even more images from the event, across various social networks.

The next step for popularising the app, Duggal tells Gadgets 360, will be to partner with OEMs so that it's pre-installed on phones. That, and he's also looking at partnering with photographers for weddings and other events.

"Until now, there hasn't been a good way to crowdsoure these photos, but think about it, there are so many people at a wedding and they're all clicking away, and you won't be friends with all of them on Facebook," says Duggal. "With Shoto, you'll finally be able to have a consolidated album of all the pictures from your wedding."

Whether that's enough to make you want to use yet another photo sharing platform is, ultimately a question that we can't answer, but Duggal certainly thinks that's the case.