How Shoto takes the hassle out of tracking pictures taken at your wedding

I’m getting married later this year. While I’ve paid for a professional photographer to document the day, I’m conscious that my friends and family will be there, taking their own photographs with their cell phones and cameras.

Cell phone cameras have improved significantly over the past few years, to the point where they produce shots that are actually frameable. These will inevitably be shared across a variety of platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Hello Shoto

I bumped into a service called Shoto the other week. Since then, I’ve been eying up using it for my wedding. We first wrote about it in 2013. Here’s how former TNW writer Nick Summers described it:

What if an app could take your photos, as well as those captured by your friends, and create contextual photo albums automatically?

That’s the premise behind Shoto. It automatically stores all of the photos that you shoot during a particularly significant or memorable moment: a holiday in Paris, that Sunday afternoon on the beach, or the outrageous bar crawl from last Friday night, and organizes them all into accessible albums.

Shoto recently introduced a new feature that makes it ideal for anyone getting married, and want to capture every moment of the special day.

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Here’s how it works. First, you create a hashtag — like #MattAndKatGetHitched or #IGiveItAYear — and you spread that around the guests, asking that they use it whenever they upload something.

Shoto will then step in, and using its proprietary algorithm, will figure out what pictures are from your wedding, placing them in a central repository. This can be shared, or kept private between groom and bride.

And obviously, this is obviously a more attractive proposition than scouring Facebook and Twitter, figuring out who uploaded what.

Automating the hard stuff

It’s a cool idea. One that I’m really excited about. That’s because weddings are bloody time consuming affairs.

Of course, the main leg-work happens before the big day. Sending invitations, picking out vendors, and dealing with the finer details is an excruciatingly long task. And after the wedding, you’ve got to send out thank-you cards, pay anyone you still owe money to, and clean out the venue. In my case, I’ll be dealing with moving house, and potentially emigrating.

Shoto takes one post-wedding task straight out of your hands and automates it, giving you more time and head-room to deal with the other stuff. And that’s where its value is.

You can download Shoto on Android and iOS today.