PicYou – Instantly Share Stylized Photos

Obsessed with sharing pictures on Facebook and Twitter? When the snapshots taken with your point-and-shoot start seeming a little dull, it’s time to try out PicYou. PicYou is a free tool that you can use to make minor adjustments and enhancements to any picture you take. Once these adjustments have been made, PicYou lets you share those spiffed up images with friends and family online.

If you’ve got a camera and an Internet connection, then you’ve got everything necessary to start using PicYou. Sign up for an account, upload pictures from your digital camera or mobile phone, and then start adding filters and frames to give your images a whole new look. The application offers filters with names like albion, infatuation, hipster, zeitgeist, dreamy, and cuttlefish, and there’s almost no limit to the number of adjustments you can make to give your images a whole new feel. Once you’re satisfied with your artistic creation, add a description, location, and tags. The photos you upload with PicYou can be shared on Twitter or Facebook, and they’ll be automatically saved on the PicYou site.

In addition to editing and sharing photos with PicYou, you can also connect with friends. Search through a list of your friends on Twitter and Facebook who also have PicYou accounts, and click on each person whose photos you want to follow. Photos from all the people you follow will show up in your feed, which is accessible each time you sign onto the site. PicYou also has a popular mobile application that lets people snap and edit photos while they’re on the go.

Practical Uses:

• Give your snapshots a vintage vibe
• Post photos of all your friends online
• Quickly edit photos to give them a whole new feel
• Keep track of the photos your friends are posting

Insider Tips:

• People can sign up for PicYou with a Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, or OpenID account
• PicYou offers a popular iPhone app for taking mobile snapshots
• Users can store an unlimited number of photos in the cloud
• PicYou offers an API for developers

What we liked:

• People can connect with friends and family through the PicYou app
• PicYou users can leave comments on other people’s photos
• Although PicYou integrates with Facebook and Twitter, people don’t have to use those services to take advantage of this app
• Users can follow their friends to keep track of everything they post

What we didn’t like:

• It can be difficult to find friends to follow when using the PicYou app

Alternatives:

• InstantRetro – http://www.instantretro.com
• picplz – http://picplz.com
• Pixlr-o-matic – http://pixlr.com/o-matic

Company Info:

• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Flixya Entertainment, LLC
• Web site: http://picyou.com

Costs:

• Free