Shorts, The Social Camera Roll That Challenges You To Share More Than Ever Before

The pressure of the perfect profile picture, selfie and photo album, carefully edited from A to Z, is real to everyone of us. On most social media platforms we can’t just post a picture we took in a second at home, with mom, for example, before cropping it to perfect dimensions, adding filters and blurring the right spots. It’s a time-consuming process for most that creates fake profiles and virtual lives. This is why Paul Davison decided to give back to the community exactly the thing it needed most: authenticity. His social app, Shorts, allows users to share the most mundane, sincere photos they whole-heartedly take on a daily basis.

The idea of his social camera roll (for iOS) is to let your friends, and even strangers, see the last 24 pictures you took, the way you took them. These are the ones, argues Davison, that shows us as we truly are: playing dress-up, cooking tasty meals or playing with our little brothers. If you can pass that initial fear of being judged, it’s a wonderful way to meet new people for whom your camera roll will be the business card.

How it works: You can add friends via phone number or username. Then you select the photos which you want to share publicly by swiping up; to make them private, you simply swipe down. You can check out your friends’ photos by tapping their name and then LIKE them with a swipe up or skip them, with a swipe down. You can also leave comments, of course.

If the idea of meeting new people online delights you, you just have to go to the “Discover” feed. There you’ll find the last 24 visible photos of friends’ friends or people you have things in common with.

For starters, you can go here and enter your phone number to begin discovering those around you pic by pic.