Snapjoy Is How Your Photos Should Work. I Love It. You Will Too.

Snapjoy is a new photo organizer and sharing tool that just finished as part of the summer YCombinator class. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and quite simply: this is the best photo application I’ve ever used. Period. It’s how digital photos should be.

The application was built on the premise that “photo organizers don’t work like they should”. When I heard that, before I’d actually used Snapjoy, I said “uh huh”. You can’t really fathom what is wrong with photo organizers in their current state until you try Snapjoy. It’s true, though – most of us spend more time simply organizing our photo libraries than we do actually enjoying them.

Once you sign up to Snapjoy (which you’ll need an invite code to do, as they’re still in Beta – I have one invite code to give away to the first person who leaves a comment asking for one), you can immediately start uploading photos. You can do this in one of two ways. You can upload photos through the website, which is still drop-dead easy, but maybe a bit more time consuming as you’ll need to select folders individually. Alternatively, you can download the desktop app called “Snapjoy Shoebox” (currently only available for Mac) and simply drop your whole “Pictures” library into it. Snapjoy automatically removes any duplicate photos that you upload.

Now, my photo library has been uploading for the past day and still hasn’t finished. It isn’t very fast, which in all honesty is the only problem I’ve had with Snapjoy so far. But then again, this is some 7000 photos or so. And it’s not really any problem, as the Snapjoy Shoebox just sits on my desktop and does it’s thing without me having to even check on it.

Snapjoy takes a very different view to photo organization. You don’t sort things into albums or folders, and you don’t tag photos. Rather, all your photos are displayed in a “Timeline” automatically. You can browse first by the year the photo was taken, then the month, then the day, and then the time of day. All your photos are displayed in a long strip that you can click on and scroll back and forth between, or you can view them in a grid.

This method of viewing photos is what makes Snapjoy so great. Most of the photos I’ve taken on holidays are of things I’ve found interesting, or of the people I’ve been with. And therefore these photos in my memory are associated with a certain time period, whether it be the month I took them or even the day. What Snapjoy does is shows you the photos in a strip so that even if you can’t remember the day you took the photos, you can see very easily what time period you want to view photos of.

The application may not be so useful to artistic photographers, whose photos perhaps aren’t as associated with a certain time period as they are with a specific project – albums/folders may make more sense to this type of user.

You can also very easily share photos with selected people by simply entering someone’s email address. And at any point, you can look at an overview of all the photos you’ve shared and remove/add people. One thing I’ve found slightly disconcerting about Snapjoy is that if you and another Snapjoy user both upload the same photo, Snapjoy recognizes this and automatically tells you who else can see the same photo. For example, I have photos that were taken by someone else but then emailed to me, and I uploaded them to my Snapjoy. The person who actually took the photos also uploaded them to her Snapjoy, and it automatically then tells me on the individual photo pages the name of the other person who can also see the photo. There’s no real problem with this, and it’s actually quite useful – I suppose I’m just in shock at how Snapjoy’s algorithm is so good that it can work out everything!

Snapjoy says they’re going to continue to be free for a while, but after that they’re going to charge $1 per 4gb of storage per month. I would happily pay this. How easy it is to upload photos, combined with how fantastic it is to browse back through past memories makes this cost a no-brainer to me. And to be honest, I feel bad that I’m not already paying, since I’ve got probably over 15gb of photos already uploaded to the service!

Below is a video shot by Robert Scoble at the YCombinator demo day of the Snapjoy founders.