GLMPS iPhone app offers a totally new take on image-sharing

Image used with permission by copyright holder

These days, there are countless ways to share photos and videos online. And everybody seems to be doing it. In fact, earlier this week, popular image-sharing social network Instagram revealed that users had uploaded more than 150 million photos to its servers, which equals to about 900 new pictures every minute.

Because of this craze, the number of photo-sharing apps has exploded, making it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But yesterday, a new app hit the market that offers something new.

Dubbed GLMPS, this new mobile app doesn’t only share photos or videos, instead, it creates a whole new type of media that combines both. The idea is similar to the discontinued Twitter video sharing service 12Seconds, which shut down last year — but really, it’s not like anything we’ve ever seen before.

Here’s the basics of what GLMPS does: When you take a picture with your smartphone through the app, GLMPS captures a photo as well as a short, 5-second video clip of what took place just before the picture was taken.

When viewing the GLMPS file, the video plays first, and is then shrunken down and superimposed as a thumbnail over the photo. The video then plays on repeat, much like a GIF file. (When the video plays large, there is sound, but not when it is small.)

The effect of being able to see what happens just before a picture is taken adds a whole new level of intimacy to an photograph. Rather than simply see the posed version of people or a situation, GLMPS offers a sneak peak into the unfettered world in which the picture was snapped.

Like Instagram, GLMPS users can share their images through the app itself, or post GLMPS files to a variety of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others.

GLMPS is currently available for free from the iTunes App Store, so we thought we’d take it for a test drive.

The app works much like Instagram in a lot of ways, though some parts still lagged a bit when we were using it, like browsing through other users’ GLMPS posts.

Capturing images with GLMPS is also a bit of a challenge; keep in mind, the captured video is of the 5 seconds before you click to snap the picture, which means the app is recording before you decide to capture anything. The easy way to solve this is to plan ahead what you’re going to take a picture of. But we found this to not be quite as simple as it sounds.

Still, GLMPS is fun to use, and is definitely new and unique. Feel free to download the app here (iTunes) and let us know what you think in the comments.

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