otos is trying to streamline group photo albums by allowing anyone with a link to contribute their own pictures.

th the latest otos update for iOS, Android, the web, users can create a shared album from any cluster of photos. This generates a link, which can be copied, pasted, or shared to other apps social networks. Once someone else has that link, they can upload pictures add the collection to their own otos library.

Compared to other image sharing platforms, ’s is decidedly bare-bones. There’s no way to comment or “like” an image, as you can with Facebook or iCloud oto Sharing, there are no options for face tagging beyond the automatic ( private) image recognition that otos performs automatically.

But maybe that’s the point. Compared to the + version of photo storage that preceded it, otos is not so much a social network as it is a private repository. If people are adding collaborative albums to their own personal photo libraries, the inclusion of likes comments could make things messy.

To that end, it’d still be nice if included more controls over who has access to a given album. though the owner of an album can toggle off sharing collaboration at any time, users will still need to be careful about who gets access to shared links in the first place, as someone with the link could then share it with anyone.

y this matters: is hardly the first company to tackle group photo albums, collaboration is a long-sting feature of -owned casa. But the interesting thing about otos is how it emphasizes ownership, letting collaborators easily save each others’ photos to their personal libraries without having to download anything. It’s an attempt to take some long-sting pain points out of cloud photo sharing, though the ability to freely copy paste a link means it’s not quite as private as it could be.