Photo Organizing App Woven Arrives On Windows Phone; Automatic Photo Albums Coming To All Platforms Soon

Woven, the mobile photo organization app launched out of Litl last year, is now available on Windows Phone, in addition to iPhone and Android. And before the holidays, the company will push out more changes across its platforms, which will introduce new capabilities like social sharing and automatically created photo albums called “Threads.”

If you’re unfamiliar with this app, it’s not surprising. Photo sharing and management applications are operating in an extremely crowded space. And even in this niche – photo centralization – there are several notable newer contenders such as SnapJoyEverpixThisLife, and PictureLife, to name a few. Like others, Woven, too, is focused on photo organization. The idea being here that today’s digital picture takers have spread out their photos across several online services, making their photo collections disorganized, scattered and incoherent.

Currently, Woven supports photo imports from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Dropbox, Photobucket, Shutterfly, SmugMug, and SkyDrive on its new Windows Phone app, and additionally Picasa on iOS and Android, Through desktop software, users can also upload photos from their own computer, and of course, importing from your phone’s camera roll is available as well.

The difference with Woven, explains the startup’s Vice President of Product Steve Jungmann, is that it wants to extend its tendrils beyond the “big few” online photo-sharing sites like Facebook and Picasa. But he also says that the longer vision involves solving other problems around photo organization – specifically the challenge of searching larger collections to find that one photo you need.

Here, Woven has some interesting ideas about how it will accomplish this. With the soon-to-launch “Threads” feature, for example, it will automatically create photo albums which are not just based on location and time (like Tracks, Flock, Moment.me, and Flayvr do today), but also on other, less obvious things. To help it organize the photos, it will use both technology (e.g. facial recognition, algorithms) as well as manually collected data. No, not tags. “None of us like to do work,” explains Jungmann. Instead, the app will prompt you on occasion with questions like “which of these photos do you like better?” or “is that a picture of Joe?” or “do you like this picture?” Based on users’ responses, it will learn about the photos in your collection and can better organize them for you.

Some of the first steps towards this new type of automatic album will be available in version 2 of the iOS and Android applications, due out before year-end. Version 2 on Windows Phone, which will take advantage of the platform’s Live Tiles feature, will arrive by Q1 2103. You can download the app for your phone here.