You just found a shoebox full of vintage photographs in your Aunt’s attic and she has no scanner (or computer for that matter) to speak of. They are amazing photos showing your mom and her sister in the heyday of yesteryear and are just too good not to share during after dinner cocktails during the upcoming holidays. With Shoebox, a new photo scanning and sharing app from 1000memories, you don’t have a problem. Simply “scan,” or take a photo of the photograph or document, add a few key bits of information and share. Sharing the photo later will be much easier than trying to describe your mom’s sky-high afro and ahem, stylish attire around the dinner table.
Interested? Learn more after the jump.
The Basics
Shoebox offers a fast way to scan, tag, upload and share photos.
Shoebox is a fairly simple app. Basically, you “scan” a vintage photograph by taking a photo with the app, then crop, rotate, date, tag and share on Shoebox, Twitter or Facebook. While this service is not revolutionary and feels unfinished on its own, it makes more sense when combined with the 1000memories website, where all the photos are stored. The 1000memories website was originally created as a way to allow users to share photos of their family and friends who have passed, now it has become a photo treasure trove, allowing users to tag family and friends, thereby creating person specific pages. The Shoebox app is essentially an extension of the 1000memories website — basically, an improved way to scan and share photos.
How It Works
To begin, you can create an account, or sign in with Facebook. Shoebox then shows you a series of how-tos in order to prompt you to get started scanning and uploading.
With the new iPhone 4S, your photographs will rival the same quality achieved with many of the scanners on the market.
All of the photos taken with the Shoebox app will be uploaded to the 1000 memories website, where they can easily be downloaded by friends and family.
Shoebox makes it easy to crop and flatten photos that have been distorted with age.
To take a photo, all you need to do is scan a photo or choose one from your Camera Roll. After you have selected or taken your photo, you will be directed through a series of steps starting with cropping (or not) where Shoebox will actually detect the edges of the photo. You will also have the ability to rotate (or not), tag the individual(s), add a caption, specify the date and location and choose whether or not to share.
The magnifying glass helps to determine the edge of photos. And the ability to work offline enables the user to continue to scanning photos when they are without service.
Side note: Shoebox works in offline mode, just in case your reception is dodgy.
The Layout
The main page of the app shows your name, your first tagged photo of yourself (you can change this photo on the website) and three tabs: Uploads (default), Tags and Family & Friends. When viewing the default homepage you will see a status bar for queued photos waiting to post or currently uploading, and your uploaded photos. Tags shows all the photos that you have been tagged in. Family & Friends features the names of tagged friends and family and the option to add contacts from your address book or to create a new contact.
Featured shows image uploads from other users.
There are three main buttons that are featured at the bottom of the app on the main screen: Featured, Scan and My Shoebox.
My Shoebox is the default setting and this is where you will see all of your uploaded and tagged photos. There are also two icons in opposing corners at the top of this page, a settings icon and a cloud icon. The cloud icon runs through the steps of scanning and uploading.
Scan is fairly simple; you can “scan” a photograph by taking a photo or you can upload one from your Camera Roll.
Featured shows a selection of featured photos that have been uploaded by other users. You can tap on the image to open it in a new page. The new page will show you the image, comments and the name of the user who uploaded the photo. You can click on their name to see the rest of their photos, tags and friends & family—there are no privacy settings.
Conclusion
By itself, Shoebox is a little lackluster, but when it is combined with 1000memories.com it makes more sense as a companion app. The design is fairly standard — visually appealing, but not boundary breaking. I do like the ability to work offline, and the ease with which to tag photos and edit the information after the fact.
I wish Shoebox had the ability to edit and correct photos with lighting, red-eye removal, etc., as well as giving the option to pinch to rotate — as it stands you can only rotate the photo 90 degrees at a time. I also had a little bit of trouble uploading some of my photos as the upload kept timing out. Overall, I do see myself using this app quite a bit as I find treasure troves of photos at various family member’s homes over the upcoming holidays.