A Photo Sharing Site? Yes, sort of. And More.
When I describe what LifeSnapz is (and I’ve been doing a lot of this lately), many people respond by saying, “So you are a photo sharing site like Flickr or Picassa or Snapfish.” And my answer is always, “Sort of.” Though we don’t explicitly describe ourselves this way, I guess we do have similar functions:
- we provide a way to store and view photos
- we allow for sharing of photos
- we enable tagging, organizing and rotation of photos
But we are more (and different) than a typical photo sharing site.
First, we are an aggregator of photo sharing sites- we enable our users to upload their photos directly from Flickr and Picassa (and more to come) as well as from their computers and cameras.
Second, our focus is on events, which means enabling the capturing of the memory (and all of its elements including other attendees’ recollections) of the event. The true full memory is enabled when all senses are activated- sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. (Yes, I’ll concede that it is impossible to replicate taste and smell digitally!). Photos certainly help to remember an event, but they are not the full memory. The full memory comes from other media (videos and sounds), as well as other people’s descriptions and remembrances.
Here’s a picture of a fish that we caught on our family fishing trip last summer:
Here’s a link to the video of that fish being pulled in:
Both are cool ways to remember the event. Together they make the whole thing come back to life.
Third, LifeSnapz enables people to stitch together their photos via time (on a timeline)
and via space/location (on a map:
.
This allows people to explore their life events and photos in unique and oftentimes enlightening ways. Now photos become organized so that they reflect a specific point in time in a person’s life that can be put in context with everything else that has been chronicled- before and after that moment.
Finally, LifeSnapz is different than other photo sharing sites in that we include a way to write about the event. I realize that the act of writing can sound like a chore to some (most?) people. But if you really want to capture a memory, write down the things that made it memorable, especially the things you can’t capture in photos and videos - like tastes, smells, impressions and feelings.
So yes, LifeSnapz is a photo sharing site. But most accurately, it is a memory sharing site.
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