Phhhoto Is An Addictive, Albeit Poorly Named, Gif-Style Photo App

Phhhoto is a new app that launched in late July that lets users capture moving images and share them across social networks. But the app you see today, with over one million photos shared, started as something very different.

The creators, Omar Elsayed, Champ Bennett, and Russell Armand, come from a digital agency called HyperHyper.com, which they still run (working on projects like the recent Playboy.com redesign). At an office party back in 2012, they decided to build a sort of gif-like photo booth as an iPad app. For fun.

Turns out, people at the party loved it, so they built out a contraption that actually holds up the iPad and provides some lighting to create a portable photo booth. They called it Phhhoto Pro and the company quickly started renting the product out to parties and venues. Pricing is based on the particular event, but ranges around a few thousand.

Again, people seemed to love it, with 200,000 people using them at various events, etc. But there was one resounding complaint: Why isn’t this an app?

And so the team went to work building out Phhhoto, an app that lets you take moving photos to share out on social networks. It’s super minimalist tech, simply grabbing four photos in direct succession and stringing them together to form a gif. But with quick app-switching to Instagram and integration with other social media, the app seems like one of many natural successors to our ingrained Instagram behavior.

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If you want to check out some cool Phhhotos, or simply download the app, head over here.