Image- and video-sharing service Photobucket announced today its launch of Snapbucket, a mobile app that allows users to edit and publish photos taken from their smartphone.
Similar to the increasingly popular Instagram photo-sharing app, Snapbucket lets users “personalize” their photos by applying a variety of wacky filters, effects, vignettes, and frames, in an attempt to make their photos look more interesting.
“Our users have been asking for more creative ways to express themselves through visual media,” said Kate Hare, vice president of products at Photobucket in a statement. “Snapbucket gives our users what they’ve asked for – a simple, on-the-go application to capture, personalize and share their photos.”
Not surprisingly, Photobucket says mobile uploads to its website have jumped 600 percent over the last year, with users adding more than 20 million photos to Photobucket.com every month. Because of this, the company also says that it all customers now have access to unlimited storage for their photos, and expanded video storage to accommodate a total of 500 video up to 10 minutes in length.
Perched at the forefront of the photo-manipulation-and-sharing app market, Instagram boasts approximately 1.5 million registered users, and recently secured $7 million in additional investment. On top of that, the service has spawned an entire industry of peripheral products, like Postagram, which allows Instagramers to turn their cross-processed-looking pics into physical post cards.
While Photobucket certainly has the user base to make Snapbucket a success, it still faces an uphill battle against the slippery street-cred cool of Instagram, which has firmly supplanted itself in the realms of hipsterdom as the go-to photo-fixer.
Snapbucket is currently available for Android, and the iPhone version is “coming soon,” according to the Snapbucket website. The company says the app will also be available for Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry devices.
