If you’ve ever taken a bunch of pictures on your phone and not immediately uploaded them then you’re well aware of the problem – now they’re essentially stuck on your phone. If you want to upload them to Facebook, you’ll have to send them one at a time. Or you’ll have to take the time to get all those photos off of your phone and onto your home computer.
Chute handles this by letting you quickly choose a number of photos and either share them with your friends or archive them online, making sure you never lose your photos again.
“It turns out,” said Chute co-founder Gregarious Narain, “that getting tons of photos off your phone is really hard to do.”
Chute, he explained, helps you to wirelessly share photos with different groups of your friends and family. Once you have a bunch of photos stuck on your phone, sharing them can be painful. Chute lets you choose groups of photos, select a group of your friends, and share the photos with them. If you use sites like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to do this normally, that isn’t a problem, explained Narain. Any of these sites can be directly integrated with Chute so that, as you upload your photos to Chute, you can also share them on one of these sites.
Here’s how it works: When you upload photos to share with these friends, if they have the Chute app, they’ll get a push notification. If they don’t, however, they get an email with the photos embedded and attached to the email. And if they have the desktop app, they can download the photos and organize them offline.
The difference with Chute is that everything can happen wirelessly and the basic idea, said Narain, is that you can get all of your photos off of your phone and either shared or stored in the cloud, that way you never have to worry about losing your photos by losing your phone, having the hard drive go bad or anything like that.
“It’s the simplest way,” explained Narain, “to get to ‘photo zero.'”
Chute will be available for iPhone and Android some time in March 2011.
