Glass — Photography Community

While not quite a ghost town, Glass seems to be running on fumes. There are relatively few new images being uploaded into this subscription service, and the engagement is weak. A noticeable number of photographers stopped contributing images a few months ago. Glass seems more a collection of bubbles than an interactive community. The marketing of Glass still seems to be based on what it is not, rather than what it is and what it could be. If Glass was brand new, I’d be more sympathetic, but the feature set is bare bones, which is probably the result of underfunding. Glass could be a photographic community with people exchanging information and insights, yet there are zero forum-type features that bring people together. Glass could have portfolio-oriented viewing environments, yet an artist cannot group images to form projects or sets that tell a larger, deeper story. Tagging of images is not possible, so one cannot search for specific equipment or genres of images besides the rudimentary categories that are provided for all users. This all feels very 1995-ish. The inability of the developers to make tangible improvements in the app’s scope is especially sad because the opportunity is even greater now than when the app debuted in August 2021: Instagram is dropping photographic still images in favor of a TikTok wannabe approach, and Facebook is making personal timelines secondary to TikTok-like media streams of nonsense. I would think that avoiding the overhead of advertising, customer data mining, and algorithm engineering would enable a more nimble way of working. This Glass seems too thin to expand to the larger universe.

I know I’m not alone in feeling like Instagram just isn’t doing it for me anymore - the ads, the influencers, the reels. Need I say more? It’s just not a place for photos anymore, and that makes me so sad. I’ve been looking for a replacement for a while and recently found Glass. At first, I thought there’s no way I’m paying to use it. But after reading about the team and their mission, I figured it was something worth supporting. It’s still in it’s early days, but the more photographers who use it and support it, the better it will be. I actually feel excited to use it - something I haven’t felt about a social media app in a long time. There’s beautiful content and folks are excited to share their thoughts. It’s the start of a great community, and I’m excited to be a part of it!

This app showed a lot of promise and there was a ton of hype when it launched but it’s a miss for me as it feels like a ghost town lately. I follow at latest count about 200 people and I’m lucky if I see 5-10 new photos a day total. That seems like extremely low usage. On the plus side, the addition of categories and improved Exif info has helped a little but you still cannot allow the location of the photo to be posted from Exif data and the categories are limiting. I’m just not seeing much community engagement as it’s missing a lot of features that help build a community, especially since this app bills itself as a photo community. Beyond commenting, there really is not much else for people to engage in with each other. I subscribed for a year and I’ll keep posting but not sure I’ll renew unless some new community features arrive. Noting that I also opened a UX / accessibility issue in their feature requests but as of yet that has not been addressed. Update, December, 2021 - Now that the app has “appreciations” or “likes”, it’s gone even quieter than before. Folks appreciate a photo but that’s dramatically reduced social interaction via commenting so perhaps its had an opposite effect than what the app owners were intending. 🤷 Now it sort of feels like an Instagram wanna-be.