There was once a time when you’d only really upload photos to the internet if you wanted to get them printed out on somewhere like Photobox or somewhere. Now days, my phone has a better camera than I do and it automatically uploads all the pictures I take to cloud storage. Things have changed but now they’re changing again because simply uploading images isn’t enough any more, it’s all about the curation (and not the filters in Instagram, no matter what everyone else might think).
Google have cottoned on to this and if you have an Android phone, you might have noticed that your autoawesomes have recently been complemented with Google Stories- a collection of photos curated into a timeline on any given day. It’s a neat idea but something that new start up KatchUp does better- and it’s better due to more flexibility and nicer end results.
We were asked to test out KatchUp over the period their great #AugustKatchUp promotion- sign up in August to be in with a chance of winning a 5 Star Family Holiday to Portugal, courtesy of Martinhal- and so far we’ve been having fun with it.
KatchUp works by creating moments, that is a collection of photos tied together by either a theme, place or time, (the time is important because all your different moments sit on a time line and it’s how you can find each different one).
The process is fairly straight forward, and as you can see from the above screen shot, it’s not exactly a cluttered interface. When you get to the point of editing the pictures you’ve uploaded into your moment, things are equally as clean:
It does pay to carefully select what you’re uploading to your moments though, as there is a 1GB account limit on the free service. KatchUp says this equates to roughly 500 photos but it will obviously depend on the resolution and file size that your camera (or smartphone) takes the pictures at in the first place. For instance, our pocket camera is a Canon and it has a 16MP sensor, which takes high quality photos at around 5MB each. Uploading 50 of these used around a quarter of my KatchUp allowance. Fortunately, there is a premium service available (soon) that will allow you to increase the amount of space to up to 10GB for a small monthly fee.
The thing that has impressed me with KatchUp is the ease of use. It’s interface is uncluttered because they expect you to have done all the photo editing before you upload the photos but also because it’s designed with the premise of making things easy to use in mind. We all have so many digital photos languishing on a hard drive somewhere, it’s nice to be able to do something constructive with them. My only slight concern would be how quickly the free storage might get used if you intend any sort of permanence in your moments, but as a way of sharing a recent event with friends and family without separately emailing dozens of photos, it’s pretty hard to beat.