Sharing photos is part of what we love about the Internet. We share photos of cats, lunch, bacon, vacations, and family. Not everyone is comfortable sharing family photos with the whole-wide world and companies keep coming along with ideas to help families share photos in a way the feels safe.
Apple has its Photo Stream, Google Plus has it’s circles, Facebook has lists, and Path has privacy. So far, the biggest problem is fragmentation. There’s still a sense that no one has hit on how to do family photo sharing in a way that everyone likes.
Familio has a new idea launching today. It’s a simple social network just for sharing photos and video with family members. At first the service integrates an iPhone app and a website (familio.com). An Android app is on its way.
The thing that sets Familio apart is that it isn’t trying to do too much. Only family members you invite, and who accept the invitation, can see photos you share. When you share a photo or video, family members receive an email notice or an notification on the iPhone app.
Photos and videos can be high res. The service transcodes video so it will play right on the right device:
“We support pretty much any video (or image) format that’s out there, and we also take care of making it viewable on each of the platforms we support.” the company says. “If we do run into a format we don’t support, we’ll notify you by email about it, and then we’ll work day and night to add support for it.”
Familio is still in beta and so far they’re going with a “no limits, max quality approach” while reserving the right to set limits (while hoping not to) in the future.
In beta, Familio is free. Plans for monetization include on demand printing and paying for permanent storage.
You can try it out at Famil.io.
"Only family members you invite, and who accept the invitation, can see photos you share." How does it know that the people you invite are family members?
Are there not services already that allow you to setup groups for photo access (Picasa, Flickr, etc.), one of which could be "Family Members", rather than using this app, which just seems to propagate the fragmentation that it discusses.