Share your photos socially with PhotoScatter

PhotoScatter is billed as the simplest way to send photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch to many of the top photo sharing sites, which currently include:

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Shutterfly
• PhotoBucket
• Picasa
• Twitter (twitpic)

The App

The first thing you have to do with PhotoScatter after you have installed it and before you can use it, is set up all your social networking services. For some services like Twitter, this is a simple as enter your user id and password, for others like Facebook and Flickr you have to authorise access from the app to your account. The app guides you through this process, launching mobile Safari to complete the authorisation stages.

One thing I was far from happy about during the setup process was my email address was clearly sent to the app developer with out any pre-warning or consent, resulting in more than one email from the developer asking me to validate my email address.

"We received your information from the PhotoScatter iPhone app. Before we add you to the updates list, we want to make sure we have your permission.

Please click the link below to be added to the Unique Apps updates list:

Click here to confirm your information

This list will notify you whenever PhotoScatter is updated, as well as notify you whenever we launch any new iPhone apps.

If you received this email by mistake, simply delete it, and you will not receive any more emails.

Thanks, and have a great day,

Ryan Wade

http://UniqueApps.com"

Once you have set up your services your ready to begin sharing your photos with your friends, family or just followers, and this can be either a new photo directly from the camera app, or an existing photo from the camera roll/album.

When you have taken or selected your photo you are now ready to share it, and from the apps interface you simple select "Share" and you are presented with all the current service and not just the ones you have set up. Select the service you want to share your photo with (these are shown green with ticks next to them) and some details like "Photo title" and a description "Photo details", although not all of the services I tried seemed to support "Photo details". When done hit "Submit" and you will get a warning, that you need to acknowledge, that your photo may take a few minutes to post to all selected services.

Once you've submitted your photo it's just a case of waiting for the uploads to complete, which when complete will show green or if it fails to upload, then shows red. This is where for me this app begins to fall apart; first off you can not post directly from PhotoScatter to Facebook with out approving each photo which has be done via Safari, which defeats the object as it is easier to post using Facebooks own app. Next with Flickr you are unable to post to any groups, just your own photostream, and whilst the app tags itself with "PhotoScatter", you can not use your own tags!! Of the 3 services I tested PhotoScatter with, TwitPic was the only service that I had no niggles with, but then again I could have posted a note with the photo if I'd used a full blown Twitter app.

Note: When you have uploaded your photo hit done and you can post another, but if like me you have a failed upload, then go careful, as whilst there is the option to try again, the app re-uploads to all selected services and not just the failed one.

Conclusion

In principle this is a nice idea, and if it integrated fully with all the services available to it, then this would be a great app for the serial internet socialite, but as this app currently stands you are better off using a dedicated app for the services you use.

Because of the various issue I had with this app I am only awarding it a poor 1 star out of 5.

AppStore Link: PhotoScatter - Price £0.59/$.99

Comments

[scw]

That is so funny... after sending "Ryan" 3 emails about this app I still never received a reply. Yet I then started to receive update emails about his contests, promotions, blog posts etc. So I reply stating I never signed up for such mailing list nor wished to be spammed. Then I receive 2 more emails directly after (bots) stating he was unable to directly reply to emails for he receives thousands... So he would be happy to answer any questions in a video reply? WTF ? The next email asks me to give him permission to do so etc.
So I went further & obtained his bot free direct no crap email address & asked him to cease on any further emails, updates & spam. As well mention he couldn't ever reply to legit emails yet instead signs me up for his spam lists.
He finally replies & says he has taken me off his list & says he never received any of my emails??? HUH ??? How retarded is he.... How else did he sign me up to be spammed by his crap to begin with then... For I don't even have PhotoScatter & now nor will I ever want to.

I highly suggest users avoid this app & any & all future dealings with Ryan Wade or any of his apps.

Sheeesh !!!

SCW

[Martin Aggett]

I checked out the developers website - I thought it was interesting that the developer chose to do a "review" video that talks about how great the app is instead of calling it a "demo" video.

[Pamela]

I like pixelpipe for an all-in-one uploader. Some of the same probs exist - no grouping in flickr, for instance - but there are many more services and it isn't spammy at all. Btw, there is something, and I can't remember precisely what, that you can do in Facebook that makes it so that you don't have to manually approve each photo to be uploaded. That might be worth investigating so that you don't have to use an uploader dedicated solely to uploading to Facebook in order to get around that. I do honestly think that Facebook makes things difficult for external apps, given what I've seen of Facebook integration in other apps.

[iquanyin]

i wish pixel pipe worked for me consistently. not sure why but sometimes--from desktop or iphone--it simply fails to send all the stuff. about 40 of 200 pix made it last time i used it. before 3.0 it always worked fine for me, yet the mac didn't get a 3.0 update, so it couldn't be that...? ah well, i'm a noob to everything. i have basically no good reliable way to upload the zillions of photos i take every week.

photonfanfare is the best because of fickr and fb integration, and it's very reliable. radar and photoshare are reliable too, and fast. it would be cool if either one integrated w/picasa. flickit is pretty fast and reliable on my phone too, but just to your stream as far as i can tell. if i'm posting to fb on phone it's either fb's own app (which crashes after every third photo i upload) or photon.

i guess i can email pix to picasa, just haven't tried it since the new 5 photo emails came about.

guess this app (scatter) isn't the one either. big noooooo. i hate spam!

thanks for the review, very helpful.