Review of Photoset

17 October 2012

Photoset is an iOS app from the makers of Tumblr that lets you combine a number of photographs into a grid-based layout and share them on the web via a secret URL.

As an app, Photoset is reasonably well designed without being breathtakingly beautiful. The UI is simple and understated.

Photos can either be selected from the Camera Roll or taken from within the app. As photos are selected, Photoset arranges them on a grid. Tapping and holding a photo allows it to be dragged and repositioned elsewhere on the canvas. Photoset does a reasonably good job of shuffling the other photos around on the canvas as you move a photo, to allow for different layouts. The effect is similar to the way iPhoto for iOS allows dragging photos to create album layouts.

Caption, location and date meta-data can be added to a Photoset, which appears on the web-based version.

When you’re happy with the look of your Photoset, it can be uploaded to photoset.com. Optionally the Photoset can be uploaded to a Tumblr site.

Once uploaded to photoset.com a custom, random looking photoset.com URL allows your photoset to be viewed in a web page designed and laid out to resemble the app. Clicking on a photo in a browser shows a larger version of the image in a carousel-like layout.

Photoset URLs can also be shared via Twitter and email, from within the app.

A history of all your previous Photosets can be viewed in the app. From here, Photosets can be shared and their URLs retrieved. Photosets can also be deleted from this screen, and new Photosets created.

Over the past week I created a number of Photosets to test out the app. I found it particularly useful to post a collection of images that I had taken on my phone but not shared anywhere else. For example, when my Elevation Docks finally arrived last week, I added photos of them to a Photoset and shared them all at once, rather than jamming up my Twitter timeline with a dozen individual photos of very similar things.

My concern for Photoset is that it does not have the stickiness of Instagram. I don’t feel compelled to share often because I need to have taken at least three photos—although Photoset does not impose this restriction—to make it feel worthwhile.

Because there’s no following/follower social network built into the service and no image filters to add mood and personality, there just aren’t enough reasons to launch the app frequently.

Instagram is addictive because it encourages you to create or consume depending on your mood and available free time. Photoset, in contrast, feels less about creating something artful, and more about simply sharing a batch of photos: Occasionally useful, but not much fun.