How is Foto different?

Details on where Foto will be unique compared to other platforms.

One of the most common questions I’ve been getting asked is, “How is Foto different than (insert another photo-sharing platform)?”

This is a very valid question, and because I’ve been getting asked this so often, I’ve decided to write this post as a place to point people to in the future. I will lay out this article by giving some information about Foto, and then I will get into all the different platforms people ask me about.

What is Foto?

Foto was born out of a frustration with Instagram on many different levels. I've been thinking about building an alternative to Instagram since 2018. People were somewhat content with Instagram during that period, so starting something new wouldn't gain much traction. My thoughts about Instagram center around its monetization strategy (advertising), which incentivizes pushing posts that capture attention above any other metric. For META to remain profitable, they must sell ads, so their clients are advertisers, not users. Their incentive isn't to build a system that helps people connect with others meaningfully. Their incentive is to put attention-grabbing posts in front of you so that you'll keep scrolling and spend hours on their platforms. They mainly care about short-form entertainment.

I fell in love with photography 25 years ago, and it came from making photographs to connect with the world outside the camera and communicate that connection to others. Due to platforms like Instagram, photography has become more about temporary sharing than archiving, documentation, preservation, and thoughtful connection. People have been trained to share photos about what they are doing right now, but these images are poured into systems that give them a 24-hour shelf life.

With Foto, we are trying to solve many problems around photo-sharing, but for simplicity's sake, I've boiled it down to 3 main issues we want to improve when sharing photographs online.

Problem One - A Better Social Experience

Social Media platforms have created behavior patterns in all of us that we don't even think about anymore. We often turn to our phones when we experience one second of boredom, but that's not even the worst problem social apps have created. The most significant problem is the social division and mental health problems most social media apps have contributed to.

At Foto, we want to help avoid social comparison as much as possible. This is why we aren't publicly showing follower or like counts. We will actively create incentives that reinforce positive behavior instead of pushing posts that create feelings of inadequacy or rage.

A lot of what social media should be centered around is helping people find connections, knowledge, and inspiration while at the same time helping them keep their network organized through various features. Currently, most social platforms make it hard to connect deeply and keep up with more than a few accounts. We all experience this right now with Instagram, where you followed someone a couple of years ago, and you never see their posts unless you actively track down their profile and engage with it repeatedly to refresh your algorithm. Then, someone else drops off, and it becomes an exhausting task that most people quit.

The first significant problem we want to solve at Foto is helping people connect more thoughtfully and giving them several ways to keep up with a broader range of people online. We have some early features planned that we still need to build to help with this, but I don't feel comfortable going into detail about these features because we are only a team of two people right now. I want to protect some of our intellectual strategy at the current moment.

Problem Two - Search is Everything

The ultimate driving force behind Foto will be our plan to search the core of the Foto experience. Have you tried to search for anything on Instagram? It’s not a great experience. The best place to go is Google Images, which has inaccuracies and biases in search results.

At Foto, we will be leveraging full photo metadata and keywords for powerful image search and account profile search. Most social media apps strip all the metadata off of images, making search less powerful. Then hashtags are introduced, which get abused and used inaccurately. If you step back and imagine what the world will be like in 2030, we run a high risk that everything online will come with substantial distrust. The evolution of AI and misinformation is going to be a problem when it comes to truth and transparency.

We want to build the world’s most powerful image search engine with Foto, built on accurate metadata and keywords. Foto doesn’t have a powerful search right now, but it is something we will start tackling this year, and it will be something we will constantly be improving. The search experience on Foto will eventually require its own team of developers and designers that only focus on making searches faster and more accurate.

One last note on search. We will have a chronological feed, which means photos you post have a short shelf life initially, but if we can build a powerful search engine correctly, people will be able to find those posts in the future. Think of how YouTube offers a better search experience, and you find older videos more naturally. We want to bring that type of evergreen search experience to Foto.

Problem Three - Integrated Cloud Storage

Quality cloud storage is something that makes too much sense to ignore. If people are sharing their art and memories online, we should also allow people to have all their photographs stored in a hi-res digital archive. Storage will likely be the last central pillar of Foto that we build. However, leveraging search within a private archive will create a seamless experience currently unavailable on other social media apps. I keep thinking about how META has the world’s photos at their fingertips, and they are ignoring all these different systems they could be offering us that help us celebrate our lived experiences.

Pro Features

Additionally, I want to touch on three main features we plan to build into Foto as soon as we can expand our team. We will add these Pro Features to help monetize Foto in the early years.

Portfolios

The first paid Pro Feature we will build into Foto later this year is the ability to add a Portfolio Tab to your Account Profile Page.

This will be a monthly subscription feature that you’ll be able to unlock. The Portfolio Tab will be the place to organize your best work into projects or themes. We believe this is important because it allows people within Foto to see your strongest work, not just your most recent work. Photographers often have projects they completed years ago, but they are still important and relevant.

Store

We will also eventually build a place for you to sell your art directly within Foto. You often have to maintain your social media account, website, and online store through separate services. This creates a lot of extra work and expense for you, so having your latest work, best work, and store all in one place will lead to a better experience for you and your art buyers.

Paid Subscriber Area

Last, we believe that the future is artists connecting directly with their audience to build a sustainable career. We want Foto to offer an area where your biggest fans can support you for exclusive access and education.

Just Getting Started

It’s important to remember that Foto is just at the beginning. We are building our base foundation and purposefully not seeking financial capital from Venture Capitalists. We prefer to develop Foto organically through the community that is naturally forming around what we are building.

When I get asked about how Foto will be different from other platforms, I want you to keep in mind these other platforms were built many years ago, have billions of dollars behind them, or at least have a 2-year headstart on us.

Foto is currently in Private Beta, and it is far from perfect. It’s missing plenty of features, and it’s still buggy, but we are making progress each week, and I believe that Foto will have a firm foundation built by this summer.

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Other Platforms

With all of that said above, let’s start digging into how Foto differs from some other existing options on the market today.

Flickr

Flickr is the platform we get asked about the most. This is because Flickr has always had a solid user base among photographers, but Instagram took over for most photographers a little over ten years ago. Since then, Flickr has been coasting along with slight improvement.

The main difference is that we want Foto to be a more welcoming place beyond professional photographers or serious hobbyists. Flickr never truly went mainstream and stayed in a particular bubble of users. We want to build Foto into a place where art buyers, gallery owners, art directors, creative directors, and other people within the creative industry hang out. In the long term, we want even more people on Foto than the creative industry bubble, but our core focus will be artists and people who engage with artists.

Flickr does some good things with metadata, cloud storage, and community aspects, but many of their social and search aspects can be improved.

Instagram

People also ask us how Foto will differ from Instagram or even early Instagram. I touched on many of these aspects above, but the shortlist is that we aren’t going to monetize via ads. Instead, we will monetize by building features that Pros and Businesses will find beneficial.

Our goal is to build a place dedicated to photography. This means we aren’t designing features around video. Since we are creating Foto for photographs, we respect small things like aspect ratio, zoom, and horizontal viewing. Foto will be a slower, quieter place than Instagram, which is noisy and very busy.

Instagram strips all metadata, which we will be preserving this year. Also, Instagram doesn’t do a good enough job of letting you keep in touch with people you are following and seeing their posts. We won’t be doing suggested posts within your main feed; we will have a chronological feed, and there won’t be ads adding to all the distractions.

Glass

Another platform we get asked about is Glass, which launched a couple of years ago. I don’t know the long-term vision for Glass. As an observer from the outside, they are trying to build a smaller photographer-focused community. Glass has an immediate paywall before you can participate in their community, which means that it’s mainly photographers talking to photographers. I think there is room for this in the market, but our vision for Foto is larger.

We will always have a free tier at Foto, making for easier user adoption and allowing a more comprehensive range of people to feel comfortable exploring Foto.

Glass also focuses on camera gear with its current UI design. We will also be using EXIF Data in the future, but it won’t be designed to make that data equal in importance to the photograph itself. We see camera gear data as something to keep hidden unless a user wants to learn more. At its best, photography is more about the subject matter within the photograph and not the tools used. We understand that some photographers want to search by camera type, lens, etc, but we see this as a 2nd layer of discovery and not something to make visible 100% of the time.

VSCO

Some photographers use VSCO, and they have some social features within their platform. VSCO has been around for over a decade, but it’s always primarily been about their presets and tools for photographers. They have the bare minimum for social networking, but they hired a new CEO last year. This may signal a new direction for VSCO, but it’s not 100% clear what they will be building next.

At Foto, we aren’t that interested in presets or editing tools. We are more interested in building a new social network for sharing photographs.

Vero

After Instagram declared they were no longer a photo-sharing platform, many people tried out Vero. The issue with Vero is that it is more trying to be a Facebook replacement. Vero is not primarily focused on sharing photography. It’s more of a place to connect on all sorts of media you enjoy, like music, video, books, and photos. Foto isn’t trying to dig into all those different media types for online social sharing.

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I hope you found this post informative for an overview of where Foto is headed and where we see things differently than many other platforms.

If you’d like to join the final Private Beta for Foto on Feb. 28th, read the full details at fotoapp.co/beta

We are taking about 6,000 more people on Foto by the end of February. After Feb. 28th, we are closing down Private Beta again and focusing on getting Foto ready for our public release this summer.

For a one-time donation of $5, you can join us on Foto and help us build a new photo-sharing platform for the future.

Cheers,

Michael Howard
Co-Founder of Foto
fotoapp.co