At first, it seems that Shoto is a little confusing. This app somehow manages to allow you to see photos that were taken on your last vacation – even when the photos were not actually yours. And not only that, it sticks them into an album and secures them giving you complete access to images taken of you whilst on holiday.
It somehow uses the location (from a geographic locater at the time the shots were taken), the time the images were actually taken and some other strange algorithm I have no idea about, before releasing the images to you.
Confused? Well imagine this: Last week I went on a week-long vacation with three other chums, we all took photos (naturally) and when I arrived home I was able to view all of my own images and those of my three pals. Mind you, I had to make a request to view them but as soon as the request was granted – hey presto! The photos came rolling into my camera roll thanks to Shoto.
I was able to tell how many images each of my friends had taken before I placed the request. Once permissions were granted, I was able to view all of the albums on the app and ask for any that happened to be missing from the image count.
Shoto manages to use the location of an event and those who are on my contact list, so if you and several of your family, friends and relatives all turn up to a wedding reception and click away with their iPhones, Shoto lets you know who was there too, how many shots they took and you get to ask them to see the images.
What I liked was the panoramic views it made of some of the shots that were taken in rapid sequence (perfect for those wide angle wedding group photos). But we are all concerned about privacy and I know if you’re not, you should be! But Shoto seems to respect privacy as a top priority. The decision to share a photo, some of the photos or none of them whatsoever, is entirely your call.
So when your cheeky chum asks for that image you took of two wedding guests having a sneaky kiss behind the photo garden, you can just deny access to that particular picture. The app takes care of all the transfers from your camera roll to the other person’s device, so there is no technical file dumping, no Dropbox or Google Drive links to worry about sharing, it’s all done simply within the Shoto app.
