If you want to show family, use a sharing app
Let me start with the conclusion. If what you want is to show your child’s photos to grandparents living far away, a family photo-sharing app — Mitene, FamilyAlbum and the like — is what you want.
Only the family you invite can see them, the photos land on the other person’s phone as soon as you send them, and comments come back. These apps are built around showing, and if that’s your purpose, nothing needs replacing.
It’s an odd thing to say while building our365, but there’s no point in talking my own book. I’m not going to tell someone who wants to share photos to use this instead.
That said, our365 exists for something other than sharing: looking back later. This article is about how those two differ.
Built for showing, built for looking back
A sharing app always has someone on the other end.
Grandparents, family living elsewhere, a partner. You send photos because you want someone to see them. So:
- the more you can send, the better
- the sooner they arrive, the better
- the more reactions come back, the better
The features of a sharing app follow from that purpose.
When you look back at photos later, though, the other end is you and your child.
You open them a year or three years on, to remember what kind of year it was. What gets in the way here isn’t having too few photos — it’s having so many that you stop opening them. Almost nobody scrolls through a few thousand photos from the beginning.
To show them, more is better. To look back on them, chosen is better. Both are “keeping your child’s photos,” and what each one needs points in the opposite direction.
If your photos have piled up past the point of looking back, Too many photos of my kids to sort may help.
Send everything, or choose one a day
Laid side by side, the difference looks like this.
| Sharing app | Keeping app | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Show your family | Look back later |
| Other end | Grandparents, distant family | You and your child, later |
| How many | Everything you shot | One photo that day |
| When you open it | The same day | A year on |
“How many” and “when you open it” are where the designs part ways.
A sharing app is meant to be seen the same day, so a large number causes no trouble. If anything, more of them carries “here’s what today was like” better.
A keeping app is meant to be opened a year later, so a large number stops it working. 365 is few enough to go through from start to finish. At 3,650, it probably stays closed.
Used together, the roles separate
This isn’t a question of choosing one. The purposes differ, so using both is the natural thing.
I use a different app myself for sharing photos with grandparents. The ten thousand or so photos I take in a year go through it. I do sort them into albums — and I have never once gone back through them from the beginning.
Into the sharing app go the day’s photos, all of them. The grandparents see them and send a comment back. That’s a conversation about today.
Into our365 goes one photo, the best of that day. Not to show anyone, but to sit there until the person who opens it a year from now — me — comes looking. That’s work done for later.
The same photos from the same day, and yet two different things are happening.
Not which one, but what you want to do
If you came here looking for an alternative to a sharing app, this may not be the answer you expected.
If you want to share, keep using a sharing app. What our365 takes on is the job that comes after: being able to look back a year from now.
Leaving your children a great many photos is one kind of love. So is making sure that, years later, the two of you can sit down and talk about them.
There’s more than one reason to keep photos. Some days you want to show them; some days you want to find them again yourself. If there are two purposes, there can be two tools.
