sharypic official blog

Your Photos Will Always Be Yours!

Instagram’s controversial privacy update - photo by Carlos Caidedo.

We have been getting fantastic feedback from you via our survey, and one thing stands out - you care about privacy, and rightly so. With the recent controversy over Instagram’s positioning on copyright and privacy, we want to assure our users that the photos you upload to sharypic will always be yours.

We store photos for 3 months on the free plan, for one year for single-events and for ever on the subscription plans, so you can come back to them any time. One thing is common for all our plans - your photos remain yours forever!

Check out our plans and privacy policy and create your sharypic event now!

Event of the Week: Dakar Rally

Photo by @DiegoLorca23 via Twitter

Today marks the official start of the Dakar Rally and sharypic will be gathering all the photos throughout the race until the 20th January.The ultimate off-road rally is in its 35th year and puts drivers to the test on a tough course covering more than 8,000km through Argentina, Chile and Peru! The race is open to amateur and professional entries. Amateurs typically make up about eighty percent of the participants.The rally began in 1978, going from Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal. Due to security threats in Mauritania, which led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, the 2009 Dakar Rally was held in South America for the first time in 2009 and continues to be there up to the present.

Check out the action on sharypic throughout the race and see off-road vehicles pushed to their limits!

Top 5 Events Of 2012

2012 has been a great year for Sharypic. We have grown from strength to strength as word has spread all over the world about the fun and simplicity we bring to photo sharing at events. From the USA to Japan, our users span the globe, and we are truly thankful for your support!There have been some wonderful events on sharypic in 2012. Here is our list of the top 5:

• PhotoWorks, a UK-based photography organisation, used sharypic to document the US elections. With the crawlers set to gather photos shared with the hashtag #election2012 over a couple of hours on election day, they collected thousands of photos providing a snapshot of how people experienced the elections.
• The Royal Ontario Museum used sharypic during their Friday Night Live series, setting up PhotoWalls throughout the museum and encouraging visitors to share their experience through photography. People loved seeing their photos amongst the dinosaurs and exhibits, and the giant PhotoWall in the main hall proved a great success.
• TED Global 2012 As the world becomes interconnected, the ways we relate and learn about one another (and the rules about what we share) are changing. That was the inspiration for TEDGlobal 2012: Radical Openness, and sharypic provided a way to capture the experience of attendees and share it with the world.
• LeWeb Paris 2012 was brilliantly captured in all its technological glory on sharypic, with over 2800 photos from attendees. You can see photos from each day of the conference here
• Molson Canadian Nova Scotia Music Week has become one of the leading music festivals and educational conferences in Canada, featuring over 100 performances, this year. Sharypic was there to capture the audience’s experiences live, as audiences engaged with the PhotoWall whilst taking part in conferences and enjoying plenty of live music.

Here’s to another eventful year of photo sharing fun!

Event of the Week: Olympic Week 2012

For the sixth year running, Courchevel hosted the French Olympic Week, organsied by Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français. French Olympic athletes were invited to spend a few days in the mountains, engaging in workshops and developing team-spirit.
 
A mix of events enabled constructive exchanges between athletes and Olympic partners: skiing, sledding, wine tasting, spa sessions, and a good dose of fun! All photos were collected by sharypic, including beautiful shots of the mountains and plenty of late night fancy dress antics.

Feature Update: Save your photos forever!

Once sharypic has gathered all the wonderful photos from your event, you might want to edit them or print them out. We make it easy to download photos with the following options:

• Save all your photos forever via a zip file download. Photos are saved in the original upload quality, meaning that you will not lose resolution and you will have files which are perfect for printing. As soon as your photos have finished archiving, we will send you an email to let you know your file is available for download.

• You can also sync to dropbox for easy storage in the cloud. Dropbox folders are automatically created using the name of your sharypic gallery. You will be sent a notification email once the upload is completed.

The download feature is available with all paid plans. For both options, simply click “Actions” from within your gallery and select “High Quality Download”. Easy!

User Profile: The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

We asked Ryan Dodge, Social Media Coordinator at the Royal Ontario Museum, some questions about his experience of using sharypic in the museum. He provided us with a rich account of how the live PhotoWall enhanced their Friday Night Live series of events.

1 - What were you looking for when you discovered sharypic?  

After our Friday Night Live pilot series in the spring of 2012, the senior management team was looking for a way to visually engage visitors via screens throughout the museum. We had used traditional text-based twitter walls during the initial spring series but we wanted something that was visual and would encourage people to interact with it and share their experience. More specifically, we wanted a twitter wall that would display photos in real time.

2 - How do you think the PhotoWall impacts on your guests’ experience at your events? 

At first, people weren’t really sure what to do with the photo wall but after a few hours people started to see photos up on the wall from the personal twitter accounts of other visitors and from the ROM’s account. Also, the ads in that cascade through the photos explaining how it works really helped as well. As people began to realize that we were streaming their photos in real time the engagement picked up. So much so that people were taking photos of their photos on the photo wall. Some people even tweeted those photos and tagged them with #tweetception, a popular hashtag on Twitter!

People began to share photos on objects they found interesting in the galleries or the fun they were having in the Discovery Gallery and hands-on areas, trying on costumes and digging for dinosaur bones, for example. They also shared photos of their food and drinks - things they really enjoyed. There was also a lot of photos of groups of friends or couples on dates which was great to see, it let us know who was visiting and why, for a date night or just a fun time with friends. I think it was also an added value for our visitors, once they found out about the wall and how to interact with it, the engagement seemed to really pick up!

Photo by @pmisir via Twitter. 

3 - Did using sharypic affect the reach and publicity of your events?

I am not sure how to measure that but I will say that I think it had a part to play in enhancing the social media publicity of the event. This series of events was almost exclusively communicated via social media, Twitter and Facebook. After each event I posted the link to the photo wall on the facebook event page and tweeted the link to the photos on the sharypic.com website. People with huge networks also took notice and having them share a photo of the wall in action really helped spread the word both about Friday Night Live and the Sharypic PhotoWall.

4 - What do you do with all the collected photos after an event?

In addition to sharing the album via our social networks directly after an event, we are working on a few projects with the photos we collected (over 2,000!) over the 8 week Friday Night Live series. We have plans to download the best shots and create an album to embed on the ROM website and use for future promotion of the Spring 2013 series of Friday Night Live. We’re also looking at the possibility of creating themed albums from the photos, one on food, drink, experiences and maybe even ‘date night’.  

5 - What features on sharypic were the best in terms of helping you to have a great event?

The real time aggregation of both Twitter and Instagram photos was the key feature for us. Having the ability to gather, post and share those photos in real time was exactly what we were looking for. Also, the ability for the live cascading photo wall was equally important, it is great to be able to gather the photos but to be able to post a large photo wall live at the event was epic! This is territory a lot of museums have not yet ventured. The option of the two types of photo moderation was also a key component in the platform, explaining that to my bosses put a lot of minds at ease.

6 - How did your usage change during the series and did this affect the results?

The first night we had the photo wall in one of the galleries, there was limited engagement, mostly because people were hanging out in the gallery watching a jazz performance. We also had the photo wall on the screens behind the admissions desk and behind one of the bars. People noticed but it wasn’t really ‘in their faces’. The second night we put it on the biggest wall in the museum, front and center in the main area and the engagement took off! We also decided to use the photo wall to display programming information and key messages, like when the bars closed, what artists were playing where, etc. This combo of having the photo wall on the main screen and displaying key messages from the museum really ramped up the engagement and we continued this model for a few weeks.

Next we moved the photo wall to a smaller screen but front and center on the dance floor. There was slightly less engagement than when the photo wall was on the larger wall but people still shared a lot of content. I think if you want to have a lot of content shared you have to display the wall where people will see it for long enough to figure out what they are watching. People always want to ‘see their name in lights’ so once they understand how to get their content on the wall, that’s when you see high engagement. As for moderation, I didn’t really use the real time moderation fully. I trusted people wouldn’t post inappropriate content from personal twitter accounts on the wall and, ultimately, the content was being viewed by an adult audience and I knew I could always hide something if I felt it was inappropriate. We did get a few (maybe five over the whole series) spam photos but nothing serious or disturbing.

Thanks Ryan for that very insightful account! If you woul like to try sharypic in your institution, or discuss ideas for how we can work together, get in touch!

Feature Update: iPhone app

We’re excited to share with you our latest update for the iPhone app. We have been busy working on the following improvements:

• The app is now more stable when experiencing network issues, so it is less likely to crash mid-upload.
• We created a wizard to explain what sharypic is about and how to use the app.
• We enhanced the map so it scales properly to the larger iPhone 5 screen size. The map view is now set as default upon start-up, if geolocation is enabled on your device. Also, the map refreshes events when zooming in or out, so you can see what’s happenning around you.
• iOS6 is now better supported, including privacy flags for photos and geolocation.
• We reordered the event menu to prioritise personal events.
• We fixed various small bugs.

Download the lastest version from the app store. We love your feedback! If you have a comment or suggestion regarding the app, let us know how we can make it better.

Event of the Week: Global Day of Code Retreat

This week we’re celebrating an event aiming to improve the fundamentals of software development and design through a day-long, intensive practice event. Over 100 countries were involved in the Global Day of Code Retreat, on the 8th December. Pretty impressive! They used sharypic to gather photos from participants across the world. We think this a great use of sharypic, that’s why it is the Event of the Week!
 
The first Global Day of Code Retreat was 3 years ago, and since then it has grown to be a well-attended and valued event. A simple task is repeatedly tackled over the course of several sessions, each session concentrating on a specific area of software development and design.  It gives developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, and experimentation, without the pressure of ‘getting things done’. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers improve their code writing skills in a supportive atmosphere. Awesome!

Event of the Week: LeWeb Paris 2012

Our Event of the Week is LeWeb Paris 2012, a three day conference which began on Tuesday. This year’s theme addressed one of the most important technological advances of this century, The Internet of Things, exploring how the physical and virtual are becoming one.

Talks range from how features of the home such as lighting, heating, locks, and even your plants, can all be connected and controlled. There are also discussions on the human body and technology, for example how our brains can be rewired, and how we will eventually become Cyborgs!One of the highlights was a chance to hear from Benjamin Cichy at NASA, who built the software driving the Curiosity Rover’s brain, enabling its mission to Mars.

Check out the photos for a glimpse into this very special conference!

8 steps for a successful personal event with sharypic!

Sharypic works brilliantly for personal events such as weddings, trips with friends and family get-togethers. Just in time for the festive season, this post offers a step-by-step guide to optimizing sharypic for your private gathering.

Photo by Emmanuelle Bourgue

Before:
1 - Create your sharypic event ahead of time and let friends know about it using the built-in invite system which syncs with your email address book.
2 - Ensure the privacy settings are configured to your needs. For example, you can make your event private and restrict access to only the people you invite. Or you can open it up to the world, your choice!
3 - Let people know about the many ways they can share photos during and after the event: for example with a hashtag like #SmithFamilyXmas, via the app, direct upload, or by establishing a dedicated email address where guests can email their photos.
 
During:
4 - Provide props such as silly hats, wigs and moustaches, and let your guests have fun taking photos of each other and seeing them on the live PhotoWall!
5 - Simply plug your computer into a TV screen or projector to see the PhotoWall in action. It will look something like this.

Photo by Katratzi

After:
6 - Schedule reminder emails to be sent to guests, to let people know they can still share their photos and view ones already collected
7 - Display photos on your blog using the embeddable slideshow widget.
8 - Share your sharypic gallery directly to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, to make sure all your friends witness the awesomeness of your event.

We hope these steps help you to get the most out of sharypic for your personal events! See a full feature list and pricing here. If you want to talk to us about any of these features, or how we can work around your needs, please get in touch: contact@sharypic.com.