FLATIRON — Look out, Instagram. Here comes Snapsta.
A Flatiron resident is taking on one of the leading iPhone applications with his own app invention, one that allows users to upload photos to Facebook instantly, as they are shooting.
Brian Marcus, the 33-year-old photographer who launched Snapsta two weeks ago, said it was the first app to automatically upload photographs to the social networking site as soon as they are taken.
“We made it super, super simple,” said Marcus, who works for Fred Marcus Photography, a studio his grandfather started 70 years ago. “It’s almost like a one-step process.”
The way the app works is fairly simple: Users log into their Facebook accounts through the application. They create an album with a title, location and brief description. Then they start shooting. The resulting images head straight to the social networking site and can only be deleted or edited after the fact, directly on Facebook.
“We’re creating a little bit of a different space here,” Marcus said. “It’s almost like a live feed.”
The idea came to him at a concert. He was taking pictures with Instagram, an app he said he still loves despite the fact that it is now his competition. But each photo took at least a minute and a half to upload to his Facebook wall.
Not only that, each image was posted to his wall individually, leaving a string of single photos filling up his friends’ news feeds, “which to me makes no sense,” he said.
“It’s extremely ridiculous how much it clutters your wall,” Marcus added.
He realized what was missing from the iPhone app market was something that allowed instant Facebook uploads. He found a computer programmer and brought the concept to life.
The name “Snapsta” is meant to be a bit like “gangsta,” as a sort of slang word for photographer, Marcus said. Both the logo and the icon are topped with the image of a fedora, à la Dick Tracy, to give it a bit of an edge, he added.
Snapsta is free to download and is available only for the iPhone at the moment, although Marcus said he wants to create an Android version in the future.
So far, the launch has been soft. On iTunes, there are not yet enough customer reviews to earn the app a rating. But Marcus said the response he has received has been positive.
There have been a few kinks to work out. Some people have run into trouble getting the shutter on the application to open, but Marcus said he and his team are working on a fix for that.
Next week, he will unveil an update of the app, which will let users accent their images with borders reminiscent of old photography styles, like Polaroid, for example.
“Everything is pretty authentic to photography,” Marcus said. “It’s not very cheesy. It’s not too gaudy.”
In the third iteration, which Marcus said he is already working on, Snapsta will include photographic filters.
“That’s what Instagram has really fed off of, and Instagram has 10 million users right now,” Marcus said. “But the difference [with Snapsta] is how simple it is.”
Marcus did not specify exactly how much it cost him to develop Snapsta, but he said on average, it can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to create an iPhone photo app.
For Marcus, the resulting product has been worth the investment, even if Snapsta never eclipses Instagram’s popularity.
“Whether it’s a success or not, I think that everybody in their life should attempt to do something along [these] lines because it is very fulfilling,” Marcus said.
