Last week, the tech news was buzzing about a new mobile application, Glass.photo, a subscription-based, no-ads, privacy-centric photo-sharing iOS application. This is being marketed as the new Instagram, as Instagram becomes a full surveillance tool for Zuckerberg (and not to forget it is pivoting to video for fears that TikTok is eroding its market).
The Glass.photo application, Glass, is now available on the App Store. It requires you to sign in using Apple — giving you an option to not use your real name and email address. Once signed in — you can either enter your invite code or you will be put on the waiting list. I waited and eventually got in. The next step is to select your subscription preference: monthly or annually. Glass.photo provides you with a free 14-day trial, after which you will be charged.
Next, Glass will ask you to select at least three (3) users to follow to start your feed, and then you are good to go. You get also three (3) invites. Luckily, it does not require you to give-up your contacts to use it — unlike other applications out there (ahem, Clubhouse and HalloApp).
The application is similar to most photo-sharing applications where you get a feed of photos taken by the accounts you follow (including yours). You can select a photo and find out the photo details, e.g., location (if available), aperture, shutter speed, lens used, ISO, date and the camera make and model used. You can read comments and leave your own comments, if you wish. Notice that there is no option to LIKE, which is a good thing.
Right off the bat, Glass provides you with an option to DOWNLOAD your photos and also to DELETE your accounts. This is very well thought out and should be copied by all applications!
Glass.photo is still on its early stages. There is no Android application nor a web-based application. I have not experienced the application crash on me, even when running on the iOS 15 beta. A gradual on-boarding definitely will help their engineering team fine-tune the application. Right now, it is a solid application for photo-sharing.
Will I continue my trial subscription?
That is the $30–60/year question for me. My Flickr subscription is expiring later this year and at $60/year, Glass definitely is a good alternative at $30/year (promotion price) or at $50/year. However, will the $10/year savings be enough to sway me from Flickr?
First of all, I have been on Flickr for a long time, with thousands of photos, both public and private. The maturity of Flickr definitely shows when it is compared with Glass. Whilst Glass aims to be the venue for photography community, Flickr has been there, done that, but lost it to Instagram.
Glass has this new shiny thing going for it, which is a huge advantage compared to the veterans. Add the invite-only roll out, it definitely can generate a lot of buzz. Glass has limited features — the basics that a photo-sharing service needs — and there is no way to go but build more on top of it, maybe matching Flickr’s, or even topping it, considering how boring Flickr’s mobile application is (is there really someone working on it, Smugmug?)
Speaking of features, the application zooms in when you view a specific photo. There is no setting to show it in full first, and just allow viewers to pinch to zoom. Search is still limited to finding users to follow — you cannot search for camera make or model, color, etc. Whilst I like the idea of not having a LIKE button, I wish that there is a way to find out how many times the photo was viewed.
Currently, Glass is limited to an Instagram-like one single community, and that may or may not be an advantage, specially when talking about photography communities. This is where Flickr excels, with its diverse collection of communities — although most are no longer active, at least the communities I belong to.
To answer the question on whether I am continuing my trial subscription or not, at the moment, my answer is no. Glass has a long way to go. The $10–$30/year premium that I am paying for Flickr still covers a whole lot of functionalities and features, e.g. web interface, multiple communities, multiple albums and groups, statistics, and API access to name a few, that are not *yet* available on Glass.
Finally, I hope that this is a wake-up call to Smugmug, Flickr’s parent company. A revamp of the mobile application, which has been stuck since their Yahoo! days, is badly needed.