The Foto App FIXES Everything Wrong with Instagram

The photo app has the potential to be a real gamecher and the Instagram alternative that professional photographers have been waiting [Music] for. Before I get into the discussion about the photo app, I want you to know that I am an ambassador of the app, but it's not what you think. They don't pay me. In fact, I pay them to be an ambassador. Uh ambassador just means you got locked in at a certain rate early on.

So, this video is not sponsored. They don't even know I'm making it. But I believe in the potential of this app enough that I choose to financially support it. Kind of like you would support a creator on Patreon or Substack or by purchasing a copy of their ebook, The Ultimate SEO Guide for Photographers, which you can find uh in a link below and uh or using this QR code. I'm in the process of editing this video.

Um but I have some updates from when I filmed this two weeks ago. I wanted to get this out last week, but I've been sick. I'm going to be popping in with a couple of updates for you throughout the video because this app is being updated like once or twice a week at this rate and uh it's been two weeks and I think we've already had three updates, maybe four updates.

All right, so let's take a look at photo together. Photo is a new photography focused platform designed to connect photographers with an audience that values their work. As a commercial photographer, I want my work to be seen by the right people. I would rather have a following of 10 people who hired me once a year than a following of 100,000 who will never hire me. I want my work to be seen by art buyers, art producers, creative directors, and agencies and any other potential clients.

And from what I've seen on threads, Reddit, and professional photography forums such as the photographers union, the right type of people are interested in it. First, the app has a simple, clean design with no ads. The lack of ads creates a professional environment ideal for showcasing your work. It is an experience that is almost antithetical to Instagram instead of scrolling past a ton of irrelevant content and ads and stuff you're not following or interested in and ads just in order to keep your eyeballs on ad units and ads ads ads.

You simply see image after image of work from people you are following or images you are filtering on the search page. Secondly, only you can see your like and follower counts. Like, if that immediately sets you off, then maybe you care more about followers and likes than the right people seeing your work and hiring you. Hard emojis and follower counts don't pay your bills. I love that photo has stripped these away.

When someone likes a photo, I know it's because they like the photo and not because 1,273 other people liked it. As a photographer, this reduces any social pressure that you might feel and keeps the focus on the art itself. When you post an image in the photo app, you can select a maximum of three tags. That's it. Three. No descriptions flooded with hashtags. No trying to game an algorithm to get more likes.

It eliminates the spammy behavior, making it easier for art buyers to search and find specific types of photography.

Now, the tags are also a strict selection of words. This maintains consistency across the entire app. What I would love to see in the future is most commonly used tags to appear at the top of the tag list. Since a lot of my work fits into the same keywords, it makes sense to not have to constantly scroll through and hunch and type in to try and get the keywords every single time. When it comes to content moderation in photo app, you have full control over your feed, giving you full creative freedom.

If you shoot fine art nudes, you're not risking having them taken down because the people who don't want to see that uh will have chosen to filter those images out in their preferences. By default, these types of images are blurred and you simply have to tap on the screen to see the original images. Now, as a platform for photographic artists, not only does photo not shy away from artistic nudes, it has a tag that you can select when posting or searching just to indicate that this is an artistic nude.

Okay, so here's the thing about fine art nudes in the app. My friend Nicholas Freeman, who has amassed quite a following on Instagram and posts artistic nudes, but it was kind of like done with meta. So, he's over on blue sky and and flashes. He I tried to get him interested in this app, but he posted a nude of a male and then the it wouldn't allow it. Uh so fine art nudes seems to be fine if the women are nude but not the men.

So if there's a penis, no go. If it's full female nudity, it's fine. That seems discriminatory obviously. And uh I think it's something that definitely needs to change. And cuz I know Nick, who's a fantastic uh photographer and artist, is not going to use the app unless unless that's changed. Uh yet another update. Uh so I've been looking into this fine art nude thing on their website. They do have a content moderation policy.

It's the link is in the footer on their website. As you can see in the app, there is a content moderation section, but there is no info about their content moderation policy and no link out to their website that shows their content moderation policy. I do think that you should have either your entire content moderation policy within the app as text for people to read or you know a direct link out to your content moderation policy.

So, and the first thing on the policy obviously is nudity. And it says, "Our app permits the sharing of certain types of nudity, specifically breasts and buttocks, when presented in artistic, educational, or similarly valued driven contexts. However, we strictly prohibit the sharing of genital nudity, any part of the vulva or labia or penis, testicles, explicit sexual acts, and pornographic content.

I understand explicit sexual acts and pornographic content, but uh the other ones I don't really understand. Especially since in going to do screen captures for this section of the video, I found this image, which clearly if I were to show you it without it being censored, does not conform to the content moderation policy. However, when Nick uploaded an image, he got a message that said, you know, this does not meet our content u moderation policy.

So that's something that definitely needs to be addressed and I do think the development team is one person in Tennessee. So at this point uh the the app is is young but if you are laying the foundation and groundwork but you are dictating what constitutes fine art nude and what does not constitute fine art nude or what violates your policy or what doesn't violate your policy then I mean you're putting limitations on art and art on your platform.

I understand pornographic content and explicit sexual acts. I think that's pretty clear. But to determine what is and is not acceptable when it comes to fine art nudes, I think you either need to be allin or all out. No pun intended. Now, when you're posting in images, none of the images that you post in photo are cropped. It preserves the artistic integrity of the images and the aspect ratios that you have chosen.

Whatever aspect ratio you post your images in is how they appear on the screen. A single tap will take you into the image post and another tap will let you zoom in on the image. Now, these are all pluses in my book, but there are some things that I currently have mixed feelings about. And the first one being chronological feeds. Now, I discussed this in a couple years ago in my video on social media app Vero.

I think chronological feeds are the worst kind of feed. Personally, I think photo needs to create an ethical algorithm and make chronological feeds an option to people. My biggest issue with a chronological feed is that when I open the app, I just see a bunch of photos from the same photographer. Because when we update our social media, we tend to do it in chunks, blocks, all at once batching our posts so that we're not stuck to a screen all day having to like upload a new photo every half an hour.

Now, if you're not posting at the same time that someone else, one of your followers is on the app, your work's going to get buried under the photographer who just posted a dozen images to their account. Algorithms are not inherently bad. It's only when algorithms are used to keep you on an app indefinitely because they need eyeballs on ad units that that algorithms become malicious. Since the dev team at Photo is building an app that is user supported and not ad supported, I'm confident that they could write an ethical algorithm that allows me to see work that I may have missed from a week ago and discover more work that I may be interested in.

So photo has already indicated that they are working on since I recorded this they are working on developing or at least in the planning stages of developing an algorithmic feed so that it's not just a chronological feed because I think they recognize that chronological feeds is like the I feel as well um are not uh beneficial for discovery. So, I look forward to seeing that that development and seeing how that plays out.

And I think they the the developer there uh has a good sense, a good head on his shoulders and uh is already thinking about this as well. So, uh I'm happy to hear that. The other thing I'm kind of mixed on right now is the lack of video support. Commercial photographers have to be creating, showing, and sharing video. Not necessarily reals, but video. I understand this would dramatically increase server costs, but in one of the recent updates, the photo app got rid of GIF uh uploads.

Uh, and that is something to me as a commercial photographer that is concerning. I get that maybe they wouldn't want it to become like a meme place, but um, as a commercial photographer like I have to be producing a video and even like short like six-second gifts, things like that. Those promote my work. Like it doesn't make sense to me that they would exclude GIFs unless they really just want it to be stills.

And in that case, my whole hypothesis about this being the app that for commercial photographers that could potentially replace Instagram is going to be flawed or just plain wrong because we need to have an app that supports the things that we're doing in order for clients, potential clients to see our work and the work that we're creating. And that more than ever includes video and gifts. Stills photography is from a commercial perspective is like it's almost secondary at this point.

There's definitely work that is being done that's putting stills first, but if you're on a still shoot, the stuff that I'm being pitched for uh is stills alongside an existing video campaign because I'm I'm not someone who has enough video content in their portfolio right now to be like hiring me as like definitely not as a director. I'm not a director, but I can produce motion work. Obviously, I'm doing that right now.

So, yeah, this app needs to support it needs to support GIFs and it needs to support video if it's it's going to work for my purposes and and for commercial photographers. But honestly, that may not be their intention at all. But if it's not, I don't see a business model that works for them that is not ad supported because I don't feel you're going to get enough landscape photographers and street photographers who are going to pay a monthly fee when Instagram is free and people already have a following on Instagram.

There has to be a differentiator on this app to attract people like myself who are willing to pay $5 a month for an app that gets me in front of photo editors who are searching for editorial portrait photographers in the Toronto area. I hope to at least see video offered as a pro feature in the portfolios when they get implemented. looking at the photo apps road map. One of the first features that they're working on for uh pro accounts is portfolio.

So photographers will be able to create a curated gallery of their work and when someone is visiting your profile they can click on the portfolio button to view your collections to view your galleries, your portfolio. This is really the best of both worlds. I've always said that Instagram is not your portfolio. It's more a place to share more of yourself and your personal work. But if you could also have curated galleries of your work on the app, that would give producers and art buyers a a faster way to get a deeper look at your work with with much less friction, without having to open a browser and navigate to your website.

Portfolios are almost going to be useless without location information because a portfolio ex exists for people to hire you. If it was just like to sell art prints, then that's a different story. You you don't need a location, but then you also don't need a portfolio. You wouldn't need to call it a portfolio. we would call it a gallery and you would sell art in a gallery. But if it's going to be a portfolio, then people need to be able to know where I'm located or even like where I can shoot because I have dual citizenship with Canada and uh Ireland.

So I could which is EU. So I can live and work in the EU without needing a visa. I can just like if I get a job I can fly over there and expense my flight. I could set uh Toronto, Vancouver, Madrid, Berlin, Dublin. have the ability to work here in Canada and in the European Union. And if uh art buyers or more specifically probably photo editors, magazines, if they they need a portrait of someone for an article or they need an editorial campaign shot and they need a photographer who is local to that region, then that's why directories like Wonderful Machine and Found Artists.

That's why they exist. so that it's easy for someone who needs a photographer to be able to find someone in the area where they are located. So, it just won't work as a portfolio without location information. You could put that in your bio, but if it's not searchable, what's the point? But you might be thinking, why would you want that? Why would you want someone to not go to your website? Well, you wouldn't.

But one of the other things that I like that the photo app is doing is that there are no DMs. If people want to get in contact you, they will still have to click your website link and go to your website's contact page anyways. And I hope this doesn't change. One of the things I hate the most about having so many social media apps is having to tame another damned inbox. The number one used feature on Instagram is actually it's DMs.

It's not their feeds, it's not their reals, it's not their photos, it's DMs. Photo is the complete opposite, and I love that. Another feature that they're working on is high-res uploads connected to a shop and automatic fulfillment and delivery of art prints. Now, I can see how this could be great for um artistic photographers, landscape photographers um and and other photographers. I also know that a lot of photographers who sell art prints are very particular about where their prints are sourced from, the quality of paper being used, the secure delivery of their prints, and in some cases the provenence.

So, I hope there will be a selection of fulfillment options for that reason. And I hope uh creativehub.io is one of those options because it has highquality printing with certification and providence. Uh I thought I saw an update about this on on threads. Uh I can't seem to find it on their Substack. I feel the update was uh s like named the print company that they were working with. I could be completely wrong on this.

If the developers want to reach out, leave a comment, that would be great. I I really think creativehub.io IO creative hub has an API, a REST API that photo could use and connect and it's fantastic print quality um and a certificate of providence if you want to set that up and they also use another name commercially uh I'll find in a second the print space it's called the print space the printspace.co.uk and it is basically a sister company of creative hub.

Creative Hub is more of an like an online sales platform that you can connect to, but the print space uh is their basically their drop shipping, glay printing, cype printing, global art drop shipping. Check that out. Um and maybe photo will connect with them and and set things up through their uh API. We'll see. So, this all looks promising. This app looks really promising, but I do also have a wish list.

Uh, I'd like to see location tagging and searching, search by name, not just handle, and the ability to pinch and zoom in or out on a feed, search, and profile pages, similar to how you can do it in Google Photos. As my eyesight has gotten worse as I age, I now get really pissed off when designers don't think about accessibility options. And I am naturally far-sighted, but I now have a stigmatisms and presbiopia, which means both my distance and my close-up vision have deteriorated.

So, I am more in tune with accessibility issues when it comes to visual impairments when I see them. Finally, the biggest and most important reason I think the photo app could be great for commercial photographers, I believe that it could be the ultimate search tool for art producers and art buyers, I'd love to see an advertising tag added to the labels and search, but in the meantime, I'm tagging relevant images as commercial.

An art producer looking for a commercial food photographer just has to search using those two tags and they'll see a collection of images of exactly what they're looking for, allowing them to discover new talents without distractions. If the developers are smart about it, they could be in the process of creating the best resource in the world for art buyers. But they definitely need to implement and allow you to add locations to your profile.

I would say up to three and include that in their search options. That way, an art buyer looking for an editorial portrait photographer in Toronto can find exactly what they're looking for right away. Photo could become the best professional photographer database in the world. Like, wonderful machine on steroids, but not as expensive. Now, I don't know how many art buyers or producers are on the app just yet, but if it goes the way of being the world's largest source book, I don't think it'll be long before they're signing up and using it regularly.

This is why I see a future for this app and why I think it's worth investing your time and your money into. So, download the photo app and let me know what you think about it in the comments. Leave your handle there so other people can find you and your work and and give you a follow. You can find me on the app at Kevin Patrick Robbins. I also wanted to mention that the photo app has a podcast on Substack.

It's free. You don't need to pay for it. So, go ahead and let me know what you think. I look forward to seeing if I'm right or wrong about this app in about a few years.