Ever since our son was born about a year and a half ago, I have been making and preserving memories as best as I can. I take way too many pictures and videos, write down all of his milestones, and share them on Facebook and Twitter. Trust me, if you follow me on either network, you know exactly what I am talking about. But one thing that I am not the best at is being able to take all of these memories and put them in one place where family and friends can go to stay up to date on our son.
Last week I came across Irrive, an app that takes your social networks and turns them into scrapbooks to help you preserve your memories. After getting to play with Irrive for a little bit, I got really excited for the potential of this app and how easy it was to use to create a scrapbook of all my favorite memories, using the apps that I already use to document my life. It is kind of like a digital version of scrapbooking, but less time consuming than the actual version, which for someone like me is a win my book. Lets take a look around this app and how it works.
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Creating a Scrapbook
The first thing you need to do is to connect to some your social networks that Irrive supports, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Foursquare. Within each app there are specific things you can choose to make sure the things you want get imported over. This is the most crucial step, since it’s the way Irrive will get the pictures and more that’ll make up your digital scrapbook
Connecting social networks to Irrive
After you are done with this, you are asked to put in your event’s information. Irrive builds scrapbooks based on things you’ve shared during a specific time period, so you’ll need to let it know what you’re scrapbooking about. There are a couple of ways to do this: you can either email your flight itinerary to Irrive and they will extract the details, which is kind of cool, or you can manually enter in your trip’s information. Depending on how much data you have, this process can take some time to pull in everything,
Putting in details about your event
What if there was an important event or photo that you took that you didn’t post to one of your networks? That’s okay, because Irrive gives you the option to manually add a post, photo, or itinerary to your scrapbook. I really like that they give you this option so that you don’t have to full rely on your social networks. This also gives people the opportunity to use this app even if they don’t use Facebook or Twitter. You are also given the option to delete pictures or posts that you may not want others to see on your scrapbook, so you won’t have to worry about random unrelated tweets showing up in your scrapbook.
Adding a post manually
Another neat feature that Irrive provides you is that it lets you create a video slideshow using the pictures that have been imported from the apps you connected. You can have up to 15 pictures and you can choose the background music from the selection that is given to you as well as choose from a variety of themes to make your video stand out. Irrive partnered with Animoto, which is famous for letting you create awesome photo slideshows, to make this happen, and it gives your scrapbook a nice touch. It is kind of an introduction to what people can expect to see in your creation.
Creating a photo slideshow
Meant To Be Shared
Of course when you spend a lot of time on your scrapbook, you want to share all your hard work with your friends and family, and the same goes for the one that you create in Irrive. What is nice is that you have control of how and who you want to share your creation with. You can decide that you want to make it public for the world to see or you can make it private so that only certain people who have the link can actually preview your scrapbook. They can be shared on Facebook or Twitter, or you can be a little more private and actually invite people by email. Your friends can also interact with you as well by commenting on posts or pictures and they can also “like” items inside Irrive as well.
Sharing options for your scrapbook
Well Rounded
What I love about Irrive is that they took a vision of being able to create a digital scrapbook and added some great features so that it could be used by just about anybody. It’s the little things that they paid attention to. For example, I love that they give you the choice of importing things from your social networks or just being able to add things manually. I really like that they partnered with Animoto to give you an easy way to create a photo slideshow, which was a nice and unexpected touch. They also definitely took into consideration the privacy factor, which I always appreciate. What I also like about this is that it has many different types of uses. You can use it as a way to document a recent family vacation you took, or as a way to show off all your Instagram photos, really the choices are endless. Since you can hook up to a handful of services in a variety of ways, you can really get creative as to how you use Irrive.
Currently, Irrive is in beta, so you can’t get access right away, but it only took about 24 hours for me to get my invite. There isn’t much not to like about this app, other than the fact that it has got some minor bugs, but that is to be expected since it is in beta. I would love to see the ability to add video to your scrapbook, and I hope that is in the plans for the future. Irrive is free to use, and I am not sure if they have anything in place on how they are going to monetize this, but I do hope they come up with a pay option as I would really like to see this app evolve and get better. If you are looking for a great way to document a fun trip or just want an easy way to share all your pictures, you have to go and check this app out.