The Growing Mobile Photo Opportunity

How smartphones changed photography and where photo services are headed next.

What happens when everyone has a camera in their pocket all the time? Photography changes forever. The smartphone (or the “smartcamera”) has disrupted photography and expanded the addressable market for photos.

So how is the smartphone different from a digital camera?

• It’s with you all the time.
  You can take photos whenever you want.
• It’s a connected device.
  You can share your photos instantly to the cloud or to social networks.
• It has processing capabilities.
  You can touch up photos immediately as opposed to going to a desktop.
• It has many sensors.
  It can automatically add location information to any photo.

The smartphone has changed the nature of the “jobs to be done” by photos. So what are the opportunities in mobile photos? I’ve outlined them below.

Photos for Memory

Now that you have a camera in your pocket all the time, taking photos doesn’t need to be limited to special events like birthday parties or vacations. You can take photos to document all the “micro” events in your life.

Lots of photos are taken now — documenting everyday and special experiences.

Many services offer the ability to store photos, including Dropbox, Google, and Apple. But the real question (and opportunity) lies in what you do with these digital memories. Innovation can happen in the way that you relive and share your memories.

• Google is innovating in the cloud with features such as “auto awesome” and automatic albums.
• Dropbox is focusing on sharing by making it easy to gather and send photos.
• Timehop lets you relive old memories by periodically pushing them to you.
• Albumatic is making group photo sharing easier on-the-go.

Currently, no one has figured out entirely what it means to be “the place where your memories live.”

Should photo backup be invisible or do people want to know that their photos are being saved off safely? Should photo viewing be pull (where you browse / search for things) or push (where you get reminders of past memories).

The challenge is understanding what people expect from their memory bank when pervasive self-documentation is the norm.

Photos for Self Expression

When used for self expression, photography can be divided into two distinct spaces: creative and social.

In terms of creativity, mobile photography builds upon the long tradition of using photos for artistic purposes.

The processing capabilities of mobile phones makes it easy to edit photos on the go — allowing anyone to become a successful amateur photographer. Services like VSCO, 500px, Tumblr, and Instagram have also created new forums for creative self expression.

“Interactivegrams” by Instagram user @dschwen.

On the social side, Facebook and Instagram corner the market .

Facebook is mainly used to share life updates — photos from trips, events, or significant happenings.

• These users fit into two groups: the casual photographer with less concern for the composition and artistic merit of his/her posts and the editor who composes, creates, filters, and styles aesthetically appealing images and posts from their life.
• Whichever approach a user might take to their feed, Facebook effectively provides tools, such as photo editing and albums, which reinforce this use case.

Instagram, on the other hand, is all about sharing moments in real-time.

An example of “the perfect shot” that often shows up on Instagram.

• In this case, feeds tend to be more carefully curated.
• The community cultivated on Instagram emphasizes the value of a beautiful photos and discourages users from “oversharing”.
• Also, there is a certain aesthetic associated with photos on the service.

Are there any opportunities left in the photos as self expression space?

Facebook and Instagram have network affects, so they will be hard to displace as the go-to networks for broadcasting to friends and family.

But, because people will always be looking for novel ways to express their creativity, there will be opportunities in cultivating more niche photo communities.

On the creation side, there are already many ways to mash-up and customize photos that are captured.

Nevertheless, people will always want to stand out so there will look for new ways to edit and enhance photos. This is evidenced by the rise of new services every week that enable stylistic enhancements.

Photos for Communication

Smartphones have made photos a viable and relatively simple means of communication.

The photo serves as the context for the conversation.

There are more photos exchanged on “messaging” services, such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, everyday than on Facebook.

In fact, more than 1 billion of photos are exchanged on these services daily.

The best way to think about these services is that they mimic real life communication.

Snapchat is a way to casually say “hello” to your friends.

• A photo adds context that a text might not be able to communicate, and it’s easy to be creative by doodling on a photo.
• The ability to send photos privately and have them disappear makes the communication worry free and eliminates the success theatre element present in other, more permanent, forms of social media.

Chat apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Line use photos as a utility to enhance everyday conversations with friends and family.

• In this case, you might be catching up with an old friend or coordinating plans with someone, and photos serve as an easy way to add context to the conversation.

Twitter is a platform for public conversations, and photos serve as a creative way to supplement the 140 character limit.

• Sometimes the photos become the topic of conversation and in other cases they help drive home the point in the actual tweet.

Since the use of photos for communication has become relevant only in the last few years, there are still many opportunities waiting to be explored.

One path for innovation is reducing the friction required to capture and share photos (as exemplified by TapTalk). Another is developing new and different forms of photo-based communication (like what we are doing with conversations in Shout).

The smartphone has redefined our understanding
of the nature and value of photography.

Billions of photos are being taken and shared everyday, which presents product designers with new opportunities and challenges to be solved.

Innovation in this space will often revolve around user experience, which can be subtle. People will continue to experiment in this space because these are still the early innings. We are just getting started.

Sasank Reddy and Jeff Mascia are the team behind the Shout Photo Messenger app for iOS.