photo factory

MoPho - your own mobile photo factory


You've just snapped the most adorably perfect photo of your three year old niece curled up asleep against your dog, using your iPhone. The lighting is just right, the dog is actually still for once, and your niece is looking uncharacteristically angelic. Now what?

Well you could email it to your sister, your Mum, your best friend, and your girlfriend's mother's cousin (who was the woman who gave you the dog), but it's far too good to leave it languishing in a digital format in someone's inbox. If only there were some easy way to turn it into something tangible, like a print, or a postcard, or a t-shirt, so that everyone can go 'Ooh!' and 'Ahh!' and a few others can ask what camera you used because of course, it's all about the camera. Guess what? There's an app for that.

It's called MoPho. (How much did the developers, Penguin Digital, enjoy coming up with that name?) It allows you to take a photo or select one straight from your camera roll and then see what it looks like on a bag, as a re-stick-able poster, or as a mousemat, keyring, or iPhone case - amongst many other things - and adjust it as necessary. Then you decide which you like best, enter your billing and shipping details, and leave them to deliver it.

To give you an idea of prices: mugs come in at $13.99, t-shirts are $22, and aluminium art starts at $12.99. So it seems pretty reasonable as well as convenient.

It doesn't end quite there, however. MoPho is based on Penguin Digital's Penguin SDK, which is something that they're opening up to other developers. If you've your own photo-based app, you can integrate Penguin SDK, and allow your users to turn their photos into products direct from your app. Interested? Sign-up is here.

Right now, MoPho only ships to the US and Canada. So there are no re-stick-able posters to be made on the fly for us Brits quite yet, but they are working on it. Just as they're working on an Android app too. And if the SDK takes off, who knows where it might go.