Android does a pretty darn good job with sharing your pictures natively, but if you want to send an awesome picture to more than one social network, you’ll have to do it one by one. While this isn’t that hard of a task, those who are very connected and love to share pictures to their social networks should look into Lightbox.
Lightbox is about as simple as it gets, and while one could say the application itself lacks a lot of functionality, that’s what makes it great. Lightbox isn’t trying to replace your camera, nor is it trying to be the next social network for you to share your pictures to. Lightbox simply allows you to share your pictures to multiple social networks all at once. That’s it.
Of course, there’s more to the app than just sending the same picture to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Tumblr at the same time. Lightbox uploads all of your pictures to the cloud, ensuring that you will never be able to lose your most treasured pictures. Similarities are bound to come up, with iCloud being one of them. The one of the main differences between the two is that iCloud will only save your pictures for 30 days and if you haven’t synced them they’re gone for good. So if you lose your phone without syncing your device you only have the past 30 days of photos.
Lightbox allows you to sync photos on either WiFi or 3G networks, but you can also choose to have picture synced on both. If you choose to sync photos on WiFi only, pictures will be stored locally on the phone and once a WiFi connection is established pictures will immediately begin to sync.
At the moment, Lightbox comes with two applications in one: a dedicated camera application and a photo viewing application. The camera application is refreshingly simple, especially when most applications of its kind focus on giving you too many features in your face. Instead, Lightbox’s camera app gives you a viewfinder, flash control button, option to switch to the front-facing camera if available, quick access to the photo viewer, and the camera shutter button.
Once you take a picture, you’ll be presented with the picture preview as well as a few filters you can apply. The filters aren’t extensive, and likely isn’t trying to replace the hipster’s camera filters but the options are decent enough. After you select a filter you are given the option to give a description, location, and where you’d like to share the photo to.
Currently an exclusive for Android, a native application for iOS, or any other mobile OS isn’t in the works right now. That still doesn’t mean that you can’t view the pictures send through Lightbox, though. The website is built in HTLM5, and if you’re visiting from a mobile browser that supports it, like Android and iOS web browsers, you’ll be able to swipe through the pictures as you would in the application itself.
Personally, I’ll probably never use this application I’m satisfied with Android’s native sharing features and since I pretty much only use Twitter. I simply don’t need an application like this. Lightbox seems to be a little like Color. in that it has a lot of money behind it, it’s for the very social person who loves to share pictures, and other people are wondering if they need it.That said, if I become obsessed with sharing my every waking moment with all of my social networks, I wouldn’t look any further than Lightbox.
It’s a beautifully developed application, and it’s still a rarity to find something like that for Android these days, so it’s worth checking out even if it’s not your cup of tea.
Lightbox is available starting today for Android 2.1+ devices, and you can grab it from the Android Market right now.