One of the best things about living in today’s technology world is that a simple smartphone can transform the way you live. You can learn a new language, video chat with people miles and miles away, and even capture timeless moments and share them with the world instantly. The fact that more and more phones today (Nokia 1020, Samsung Galaxy Camera) are coming out with impressive cameras is clearly an indication that people love capturing photographs. If you are big on taking photos, then its time you did more than just that! An interesting app for iPhone called Clashot not only lets you share your photos with the community, but also lets you earn money while you’re at it. In this post we take a look at the features of Clashot and how it can make you a smart and savvy photo marketer.
Clashot for iPhone: Review
Clashot is the brainchild of the popular stock photography site Depositphotos. Its premise is pretty simple. You capture images of any event happening in your life; a wedding, a street fight, a chance meeting with Obama… whatever. Then use the Clashot app to put them together in the form of a photo album or report, upload them to clashot.com to share them with the world.
When the images are uploaded to the website, the Clashot photo community can view, rate, and comment on your images. Nothing fancy there as there are plenty of sites like Flickr and Instagram that lets you do that. But what makes Clashot unique is that if your photos are identified as some of the best ones, they will be selected by Depositphotos to be placed in the Editorial section of their website.
And that means your photos are in front of the world’s leading news and advertising agencies; publishing houses and other huge photo consuming conglomerates. And every time your photos are purchased by these agencies, you earn money by way of royalties/commissions, which you can then redeem right from your Clashot application itself. Cool!
Clashot Interface
You’ll need to be part of the Clashot community for this to work, so make sure you sign up and sign in. Accept the terms and conditions. If you want your images to be sold set up your payment options and voila! you are ready to rock n roll. The Home screen features five tabs Wizard, Feeds,Camera, Profile, and Settings.
The Wizard section walks you though the process of taking photos preferably around a theme, uploading them, creating a report or an album with titles, tags descriptions and categories. With the requisite details filled in you can upload the photos onto Clashot’s servers, where they will be approved by the moderators and then made available for public viewing.
The Feed section displays photos from the community. You can sort the images by category, latest photos, popular photos, or other options. The images are displayed in a Pinterest styled layout with options to share, vote on, and rate them. Going by the interaction in this section, it looks like the Clashot community is quite active and engaging.
The Camera section lets you capture photos and upload them to the reports section.
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The Profile section contains your account information. You can also check out messages you’ve received, your followers and following stats, your financial information such as balance in the account and withdrawal options (PayPal or WebMoney). The section also displays your social accounts so that you can connect to Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter.
The Settings section contains basic information about your network and notifications, nothing too significant.
Clashot Features
Here’s a look at some of the main features of the app.
- Creating multiple theme based photos: You can take multiple photos on the same subject and create a photo collage, if you will, and submit it as a report for the community to sift through.
- Strong and interactive community.
- Social sharing is well integrated into the app making it easy for the community to share them.
- Convenient funds withdrawal through PayPal and WebMoney.
- An intuitive notification system alerting you when your photo has been purchased.
Clashot: The Good and the Bad
Clashot doesn’t have the most fanciest of interfaces, but it has enough to get the job done without a sweat. You don’t need a tutorial to figure out how to use the app.
Clashot is more of a marketplace app and less of a photo app. So don’t expect it to contain feature-rich effects and styles, filters, and editing controls. It has some basic tools, but if you want to create awesome photos, you’ll be better off with Snapseed or some such tool.
The commissions for sale of the photos may seem a bit low at 44%, that $0.35 from each purchase of your images. But you don’t HAVE to sell photos you upload to Clashot. You can always opt out and that’s a good thing for passionate photojournalists.
Overall, Clashot looks like a promising app that stands somewhere between a photo app and a photo marketplace app. It could do well if future iterations of the app makes it a powerful photo capturing and editing tool as well, but for now, there’s always the allure of making a bit of money while you enjoy your photo sharing passion with the world. Since most of us smartphone-owning folks are doing that anyway, Clashot offers a good enough reason to indulge.
Check out Clashot and tell us what you think of the app.
Website: Clashot.com
iPhone App: Download Clashot
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