This app might make your travel better because it lets your friends and family almost instantly see the photos you want to share with them. It eliminates the third-party Instagram and Facebook or Twitter services, where you might have more ‘friends’ than the circle of trusted people with whom you would actually want to share your travel pictures without having to create albums with restricted access, as in Facebook, for example.
It is a travel focused application you won’t be using every day, but it does a great job of keeping your friends and family up to date with your whereabouts and your experiences. It is also a great option for travel groups to collaborate on their travel photos, upload them to a single album, tag them, attach them to the map and download them when the trip is over.
The app is beautifully built and easy to use and the only inconvenience here is that you have to invite your friends to the album first, and then start adding photographs to it. You can invite your friends to Tripcast albums if you have their email or phone number, and every time you add new content to that album, they are notified.
Tripcast takes travel photo tagging to the next level by letting you tag your images on the map, so that your family or you, when the trip is over, will be able to see your photographs according to your travel route, instead of by date.
This approach to photographs social sharing is different than that of Facebook and Instagram, and has its indisputable advantages. First of all, it is private because you only add the people you’re willing to share with, without leading for dozens or maybe hundreds of your Facebook and Twitter friends and followers. Secondly, it lets you upload photos instantly as you take them, so that your family is notified immediately when new content arrives, so that they can like and comment on your experiences. It lets people stay connected when there are miles separating them, which is especially true with students who study abroad, or spouses who have to travel abroad on business, especially for a long time.
Traveling groups, on the other hand, can upload their collective photos into a single album for backup, and when the trip is over, every member of the group can download the entire album, extending the travel experience.
The Perks
Tripcast is a free, simple, beautiful and private photo sharing application designed specifically for travelers. It has a map to pin your pictures to; it allows you to create private photo albums and share them with the very limited circle of trusted people; it allows those people interact within the album; it sends them instant notifications when you upload new pictures; it keeps track of your whereabouts, which may be good for security minded parents.
A Word of Caution
My only concern is, as usual, security. Since the application taps into your camera roll and geo-tagging, it has extensive permissions within your device, and knows your location. Not to mention that the constant use of GPS can significantly drain your battery. It is also somewhat inconvenient to have to invite people first, and then add images to the album. Finally, since we’re talking about cloud storage and private pictures, you may want to consider taking sensitive pictures with your digital camera and avoid cloud storages for the sake of privacy.
