We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.
With 7moments the default is private photo sharing and the design – mixed with functionality – of the site is really its USP.
This is a really nice experience in a photo sharing web site. Everyone who has access can download the photos and it’s much easier to use than a Flickr group (where everyone has to have a Yahoo name, then join Flickr etc etc – this is just one click).
The private nature works very well. It certainly feels different when someone presses ‘Love’ on a photo which only two people have access to.
It’s biggest competitor os ZangZing which we wrote about here – however, you can easily breach privacy on ZangZing by importing someone’s private album of Facebook Photos into the app. On 7 moments you can only import your own.
You can add pictures, download them and add people to sets of photos. You can zoom in and rotate photos and horizontal photo scrolling makes it an ideal Web app for iPad. Photos can be imported from Facebook or drag and dropped from the desktop of Mac or PC and from within iPhoto.
Although running as a private beta right now it’s easy to pick up an invite.
Business model? It looks like they could ultimately charge for this in a freemium style, such as having a free service but charging for a wedding skin for an album or perhaps filters or ‘era themes’ like the 1950s etc.
Started in June, this startup team consists of Stefan Kellner, CEO, David Linner, CTO and “@Kosmar” – CPO and UX, Chief of Product. Incidentally Kosmar is one of the most famous UX designers out there, having come up with the original Web 2.0 mind cloud in 2005.
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