There are many ways to share photos with your friends and family, and I better not count the ways to do it with everyone. But that doesn’t seem like ideas for finding new ways to share those photos, and that it is demonstrated by the makers of Locket on the iPhone.
Unlock iPhone and View Photo
Locket is an application that offers to share photos with a very small group of people, from one to twenty, through an iOS widget. It can be a closed group of friends or just one person, like your partner.
The way to share the photo is simple: you open the app, take the photo and send it. This will appear in the Medallion widget, which you must manually add to your home screen. The idea is simple, it does away with the hassles of storage and cloud services, and has garnered enough attention to raise $12.5 million in funding a few days ago.
Calm down, my friend is fine. Your dog is very pleasant.
I tested Locket with a friend and the idea is effective: the photo appears directly in the widget, without you having to open an application, and it’s a very quick way to see something special or your group of best friends
The biggest friction points I’ve found are the requirement to register using the phone number (I see no reason to have to give it awayeven more so when you could use Sign in with Apple), and photos aren’t deleted from your friends’ devices if you delete them:
Matt Moss, the developer behind the app, intends to use the funding money to hire more people and continue to focus on sharing photos with “that most intimate group of people who care about you. the most heartfelt”. The idea makes sense because of the little effort that needs to be made: normally the general user always ends up using courier services
Right now, Locket is completely free and you can download it from the App Store, but of course Moss is already thinking about adding a subscription to make it profitable. Next step: possibility to respond to each photo and to be able to edit the above with filters.
