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The new Android app has an eye for privacy — and the people who matter most
Instagram may be a runaway hit, but sharing one photo at a time with a wide open social network is the exact opposite of how many people want to handle the pictures they take. If parceling out your digital memories to the people you love is what counts, a new Android app called Kicksend might be right up your alley — especially if those parcels are the size of digital wheelbarrows.
We spoke with Kicksend CEO Pradeep Elankumaran about what makes Kicksend unique — and who exactly it's meant for. "People love recording every moment of their lives," Elankumaran said. "You're sharing to very tight-knit groups of people who you know very well; it doesn't require a lot of curation. Most solutions are highly technical. [Email is] a process that everybody understands."
According to Elankumaran, it's all about "getting the memories you care about to the people you love. We're in the business of shipping memories." Whereas other tools are like virtual storage lockers (that you sometimes need keys or logins to get into), Kicksend aims to be the "postal service" of photo sharing.
KicksendThe idea is simple: you take a metric ton of photos and need to share them with the people who matter. Then what? Not everyone's comfortable posting that sort of thing on Facebook (and for good reason), so many of us resort to email. Since everyone uses email, it doesn't require an extra signup or any technical knowledge — not to mention you won't ruffle feathers by going public with pics that seemed perfectly kosher to you.
That's where Kicksend comes in. Built around email, Kicksend lets you unload your photos in big batches (roughly 75% of Kicksend's users share big pools of photos this way, according to Elankumaran) and ship them off to groups of family and friends, who you can curate into groups for quick, seamless sharing.
Concerned about privacy and email forwards going all willy-nilly? Toggle on a setting for an extra layer of security when you send your pics, and any user will have to sign in to take a peek at them. Kicksend has been around for a while, both on desktop (for Macs), on the web, and on the iPhone, but now Android users can get in on the photo sharing utility too.
The new Android app, like the iPhone app, pairs nicely with Kicksend for desktop, which automatically downloads photo batches to a Kicksend folder on your hard drive. But receiving photos on the web is easy too: just follow a link through your email and download the pictures that you want to keep. On Android, you can queue up an unlimited amount of photos to send, which does give the app an edge over its iOS counterpart.
KicksendWhile Kicksend isn't the flashiest service around (that honor goes to Bump, an app that lets you swap photos by literally bumping phones), it's a solid utility for sharing photos with your inner circles — especially if your friends and family aren't the most tech-savvy lot across the board. With a sleek, simple interface and no limits on photo quality and batch size, Kicksend is a no fuss process, just like when "photo sharing" meant just handing over the negatives.
This article originally appeared on Tecca.
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