Photo-sharing service EyeEm is announcing today that it is partnering with Foursquare and The Huffington Post to get photos taken by its users in front of more people with the introduction of two new competitions in its iOS and Android apps.
The competitions are part of EyeEm’s “Missions,” where members of the community can submit photos around certain areas or topics (like the World Cup or photos of people in love) in exchange for prizes.
The missions announced today are both intended to get the work of EyeEm users in front of more people outside of the company’s app. For its partnership with Foursquare, users submit photos to the “Where do you Swarm?” mission by adding a tag to photos they upload to the app, which then show up on the profile pages of venues in the Foursquare app. Ten days from now, a winner will be selected to receive $300 and their submission will be hung in Foursquare HQ in New York City. Runners-up will receive Foursquare apparel and be featured on EyeEm’s blog.
The mission for The Huffington Post (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by AOL) is a more straightforward content partnership between the two companies. The theme of the mission is “What Does Peace Look Like To You?” and users can freely submit photos that they think match the theme. There’s no cash prize for photos submitted to the mission — the only reward is to have your work featured in Huffington Post articles, with picture linking back to EyeEm profiles.
While that seems like a great opportunity to get work out their for photographers, it’s also in that awkward gray area where artists give out work for free online in exchange for “exposure,” a practice that some consider exploitative. With that said, this is something you can opt-in to from an app where you’d freely share those photos anyway and many EyeEm users submit photos to the company’s missions in order to get feedback on their work, not for the monetary rewards.
In other news, EyeEm also began rolling out a new version of its iOS app today. The two biggest changes are a simplification of the overall interface and the addition of a feature the company is calling “EyeZoom.” As you can see in the photo above, everything in the app is available at all times — nothing is hidden off to the side in a menu you have to know to swipe to.
The introduction of EyeZoom is part of the company’s efforts to put as much emphasis on high-quality photos in its apps as possible. Tapping anywhere on a photo seamlessly zooms in on a high-resolution version of the portion of the photo while the rest downloads in the background. The result is you can appreciate photos as they were intended to be seen faster than you would clicking on a thumbnail and waiting for the entire photo to load in other apps:
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