First Look: PicPosterous – iPhone app for easy photo sharing and posting
Minimalist blogging service Posterous launched their first iPhone app today, called PicPosterous, that aims to simplify real-time photo sharing using their sleek ‘no-signup-required ‘ mini-blogging service.
Posterous ‘ main selling point is that no signup or account is needed; you just post something and then use the URL provided. Though, you can sign up for much more functionality, and even use your own custom domain name.
Traditionally, you would post content to Posterous by sending an email to post@posterous.com with whatever you wanted to post attached. If you attached more than one picture, Posterous would display all the pictures in a nifty album, as shown in this gallery on my blog.
If you attached a video file from the iPhone 3GS, Posterous would encode it to H.264 format and embed it on the website using the HTML5 spec, which means that the video will playback in Mobile Safari “ a real slick feature!
But what if you wanted to post an album of several pictures, taken over the course of a day, or a weekend, etc.? Previously, you ‘d have to wait until you ‘d taken all the pictures you wanted to post, and then create your post. Once the post was created, there was no way to add additional pictures later.
Now, using their PicPosterous app, you can post your pictures as you take them, and the app will update the existing post with additional pictures. This means you can share your pictures on Posterous as you take them, providing a real-time sharing experience, without having to create a bunch of separate posts for each batch of images.
The app allows you to set the Album ‘s name (post title), select whether the album will be private or not (hidden from view and only accessible via secret URL), and whether Posterous will auto-post to additional services.
One of Posterous ‘ really amazing features is they provide a very easy way to immediately cross-post your content across any number of social sharing sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, etc.). With one quick post to Posterous, your pictures can be distributed to all your web sites and profiles.
If you ‘re looking for a quick and easy way to share pictures in real-time while on the go, or if you currently use the Posterous platform for your blog, I ‘d strongly suggest you take a long gander at PicPosterous and try it out for yourself. The app is free, the service is free, and the development of the service is very active and the support is responsive and friendly.
You can find PicPosterous on the iPhone App Store (link), and visit Posterous to set up your own personal Posterous site.
I love Posterous, and this is an awesome new app. I just wish you could post video through the app as well…
I agree greenpaz, I'd like to see Posterous come out with a more full featured app, along the lines of the very good Tumblr app for posting any media type, including allowing post tagging and commenting, and integration with the Posterous Subscriptions (again, along the lines of the Tumblr Dashboard view in their app).
I think the desire from the users is there, though I get the feeling from Posterous that they're really pushing the "email-to-post" function, and they just want to use email as the interface. This makes it easy and straigtforward for them, but I do think a full-featured app (which I'd even pay up to $9.99 for!) has a place in their service model.
Cheers, and thanks for the comment!
-Josh
you can post photos and video using PicPosterous. You can do photos, video, audio to Posterous using email. You can add tags in both. So in what way is the Tumblr app better for posting media?
an iPhone specific view of Posterous makes sense to make it easier to read.
Sachin,
Thanks for the comment!
I did not know you could post video using PicPosterous; that is great to hear! Thanks for the heads-up.
While I understand the appeal of posting everything via e-mail (and let me say I love the Posterous service and use it for my own personal blog), the iPhone experience is somewhat limited. There is no way to add formatting, alignment, etc. using the iPhone's Mail app, like one can do on the desktop using Gmail or similar.
While I'm not saying the Tumblr app is "better" for posting media, the idea of a dedicated app, that provides more functionality than the built-in Mail app, would be very beneficial for users who do the majority of their blogging while mobile.
I think the ability to post pictures and video, and add more pictures to a gallery throughout the day, is an excellent feature and I will certainly be using it with my Posterous site. But I would love to see a full-featured app, and would even pay for it, that would give me 100% full functionality from my iPhone.
-Josh
you can. PicPosterous supports video as well
Posterous makes my day with this app