PicShareParty Makes Photo Sharing Easier and More Private with Twilio

PicShareParty Makes Photo Sharing Easier and More Private with Twilio

People are okay with all 1,000 of their Facebook friends seeing carefully composed pictures of their morning latte. But pictures of weddings, baby showers, and family reunions are a little more sensitive than the rosetta your barista poured that morning. Jeremy Senn built PicShare Party to give friends and family an easy to share pictures privately via SMS without having to download an app.

When Jeremy went on a family vacation to Hawaii, his whole family snapped photos throughout the trip. Every day they’d text each other photos from the day, spending a ton of time and data trying to make sure everyone had the photos they wanted. Despite the effort, each family member had an incomplete digital photo book of the vacation. Jeremy got home and sought out build an easier way to share photos.

Think of PicShare Party as a private photo book that guests/family can add to via text.  Users can text the event’s Twilio number to add photos to the gallery. After the event, the owner of the gallery can curate and download all the pictures, and send the gallery’s link to guests via Twilio SMS.

Jeremy says that keeping everything SMS based eliminates two big barriers to sharing: downloading apps, and giving up privacy. Jeremy built the prototype of PicShareParty himself using Twilio’s docs and a Ruby on Rails stack. After completing the prototype he bought a Twilio MMS shortcode to take PicShareParty to market.

Although PicShareParty has only been live for a few months, Jeremy is actively building out new features for users that allow them to control who sees what photos, and how they get them. He’s currently working on a two-factor authentication style system that will identify  guests who contributed photos versus guests who did not contribute photos by their phone number. That way event organizers will have another way to determine how to share photos.

You can learn more about PicShareParty here