BYO Booth

BYO Booth an Instagram driven product has been officially released and you can now purchase it on their website.  The app is an interesting take on event photography and not so much on photo booth booths. It effectively crowd-sources the photography portion and centralizes the printing. I see this app being better suited for bars and night clubs and not so much for the event based photo booth industry. In these setting I can see it really shine.

Some of the sell points of the whole application are:

  • No booth required as all the photos are taken on guests mobile devices running Instagram. An interesting concept to photo booth owners.
  • Display advertising. The ability to add videos and images to the slideshow does open up some nice possibilities.
  • Download previously hashed photos from Instagram. This is described as follows: When you check the availability of your hashtag you will now be asked if you want to download the existing photos from Instagram.  This was a suggestion from a user who wants to have guests at a wedding take pictures all day long before he was even set up.  When they get to the reception he will have all of their photos from the day already in the slideshow.  A great twist on the old idea of a disposable camera at everyone's table.
  • External watch folder. In this latest release you can monitor a specific directory and include those photos. Add photos from other sources to BYO Booth!  This means if you are using another photobooth software or a camera with an Eye-Fi card at the same event as BYO Booth, you can have those photos show up in BYO Booth's slideshow too.  Just pick the external folder and enable the Watch Folder in the settings.  Keep in mind that these photos will be center cropped to match the square Instagram format.
  • 3 simple print modes. Instagram syle (1 photo), Polaroid style (2 photos) and a 3×2 layout (6 photos).

BYO Booth also has Facebook integration, though I have not verified if pages are supported. They state that the 1×1 photos are always uploaded to Facebook when enabled but that other print formats are not. I am not sure if I like this or not as I can see some loss visibility by this.

Another interesting feature described is a grid display mode. I like the concept here and look forward to seeing it in action. They describe the functionality as follows:

If you don't want a slideshow and would just like to have the grid always displayed, you can set the Display Mode to “Grid” in the General Settings.  What's cool about this is that it populates much quicker than the slideshow, so you can let it sit there and just watch the photos come in practically in real time.  It's now my preferred way of running BYO Booth now.  The grid will display in reverse chronological order, so that the newest photos are on top, as opposed to Slideshow mode, where it makes more sense to have the photos in the order they were taken.

At $399 the price point isn't too bad considering the amount of equipment it takes out of the equation. They even have a nice intro video (below) for you to check out.

If you are interested in trying BYO Booth out for yourself they have a free trial available on their website. I definitely recommend that you give is a try.

Have any thoughts on this application and the business opportunities it creates? Start a discussion and leave a comment below.

©2012 - 2024 PhotoBoothOwners.com an amazing community of photo booth operators

Log in with your credentials

or    

Forgot your details?

Create Account