Keepsy turns your iPhone into a more personal photography tool

Startup Keepsy today expands beyond its business of printing digital photos with the release of an iPhone application that assists people in all steps of the mobile photography process.

Two-year-old Keepsy started its life offering Facebook members a way to create hardback scrapbooks from digital shots, but the company quickly moved into the now popular business of printing Instagram captures. Today, the print shop, which has more than 100,000 users, turns a new page with Keepsy for iPhone.

Keepsy for iPhone comes with four primary features designed to assist people with all facets of mobile photography, covering everything from tools to take better shots and easy options to print them.

“The first problem we wanted to tackle was the mess that is your camera roll,” Keepsy co-founder Blake Williams told VentureBeat. “So the first thing the Keepsy app does when you install it is scan your photos and separate them into ‘Photo Sets,’ organized by date and time.”

The app’s organization process pivots around a person’s shooting habits and sorts through all shots to build sets based on their life events, Williams said. Members can also build their own sets, and invite iPhone-owning friends to add photos to sets. You can share all sets with social networks or with groups of friends, regardless of whether pals have iPhones or not.

The iPhone application also comes with an in-app camera and photo filters courtesy of photo-editing company Aviary. The startup helps application users make the most of these features by hosting weekly photo projects.

The application, as would be expected, pulls from Keepsy’s prowess in the printing business to give users an easy to way to get mobile captures off their devices and into their living rooms. The app uses various signals such as friend feedback to select the most appropriate photos, and then automatically generates a photo book for printing. Users can then edit books as they see fit and order a printed copy starting at $14.95.

“While apps like Postagram and PostalPix — which focus solely on single prints — have been successful, we believe that creating a single-purpose app for printing books will fail from lack of use,” Williams said, addressing why the startup felt compelled to move beyond the niche mobile printing space. The company, he said, tested a single-purpose app over the summer but decided it needed to do more to grab a person’s long-term attention.

“We found that once we began adding features like shared Photo Sets and Photo Projects, the testers started making the app part of their daily routines.”

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Photo credit: bareform/Flickr