Foto Walks 2026 with Michael Howard
A little mid-week episode to let you all know about some photo walks taking place this week in conjunction with Foto, the photo sharing app. You can join one of the many walks this weekend, 26th September, taking place all over the world. To find out more head over to their website or listen to my conversation with Michael from Foto.
Support the show on Patreon.
Episode Transcript
Iain
The tiny screen in our pocket that connects us to the internet is filled with distractions and not filled with great places to share photography. If you go down the main route of things like Instagram, what you find very quickly is you're stuck in a doom scrolling cycle, not putting the thing down when you should be going to sleep, and worse than that, looking at another advert for a thick USB-C cable or a magnetic mount for your car. That might just be me.
But last year there was hope in the form of the photo and I spoke to Michael Howard, one of the small team bringing photo to the world. A photo sharing app with a chronological feed, high quality, lovely photography, a focus on images, and crucially with an end point. You can look at it, be up to date, put it down again, and be done.
Well, last year to help grow the community around photography and give a little back, photo organized photo walks around the world. I led one in Inverness and they were all over the place. And this year the photo walks are back.
They're taking place this weekend on the 6th of September. And I wanted to put out a little episode just talking to Michael to get a quick recap and give a rundown in case you didn't know about them and there's one near you that you would like to take part in. So here's my conversation with Michael Howard of Photo.
Michael, it is lovely to see you again. How are you and the Photo crew getting on?
Michael
Doing great. Yeah, nice to see you again. Thanks for having me back. Excited to chat and kind of catch up with what we're doing and, you know, what you're doing. So I appreciate it.
Iain
Yeah, of course. Well, it seems like you've had a really busy year with photo and you're throwing out updates and features and improvements. There's the web version we should probably briefly touch on. But for someone listening, if they're not familiar with photo, what is the pitch?
Michael
Yeah, the short version is it's photo sharing app. We have it on Apple and Android and it's on the web now, which we released this summer. And it's chronological feed.
You only see who you follow. We do not crop your photos. There's no ads.
There's no video. There's no music. It feels a little bit like how Instagram used to be back in the day, but more modern.
And yeah, it's free. There's no ads. We have optional paid features for those that want to be a power user and unlock a few things.
That's kind of how we're monetizing. But yeah, we're bootstrapping it. No investors, just small team, four people.
and trying to build something new in the world. So that's what we're doing.
Iain
And I will say to listeners, it's wonderful. And the thing I really love is that like all scrappy groups of people making things on your own and trying to get it over the line, you then also decided to make your lives more complicated by organizing a global day of photo walks, which is now in its second year, which I'm taking part about. Can you tell listeners a little bit about where that came from and what it is?
Michael
Yeah, so we wanted to bring something last year that would help just build community offline. You know, what we're building is an online app, but people are also tired of a lot of social media in a lot of ways. And so we wanted to always have some sort of part of what we do is in person and, you know, face to face.
And so people love a good photo walk and it's just a great time to like just bring people to the community. and make new friends and build community. And so last year we just was like, well, what if we do this thing where it's, you know, it's free for everyone.
You just get some people together. It could be, you don't even need to be a photographer. Just bring your iPhone if you want, if you're just interested in photos and yeah, just meet up at a meeting point, walk around for an hour and a half, two hours, grab a bite to eat or some coffee afterwards.
You know, make some new friends, take some pictures and that's pretty much it. So there's pretty, We did it last year and I think we had like 2,000 people or over 1,500 people across the world. We're like on multiple continents, tons of countries and cities and it went really well and people really loved it.
And so we were like, well, we'll try to do this every year. So we do it kind of every third week, weekend in September usually. And this is our second year.
And so we've like doubled the amount of attendance. from last year, like over 3,000 people have signed up so far, over 190 walks across the world. It's growing and it's just, yeah, we're fun over it's looking forward to it.
Iain
And the reason I wanted to get you on was to say there is obviously for listeners, not everyone listening is within an hour's drive of Inverness like I am, but there are ones near you, like if you're in the UK, obviously London, I think Cambridge, York and a few other places. So have a look because there might be one near you. And obviously, if you can get on a train in the Inverness one is this weekend, which is why I wanted to have a conversation with you and sort of put this out into the world.
It's super fun. Like last year was great. And I've stayed in touch with a lot of the people who took part last year. And I think we've got repeat joiners. We've got one guy coming up from Glasgow.
Shout out to Andy, who cycles everywhere. I'm very worried that he's going to cycle, but we'll see. But it is really cool.
It's great to hear that it's so many folks like doing that as well, like joining and doubling from last year. Is there any kind of thing that we should get behind in terms of posting all our pictures and where we can see other people's? Is there a kind of single hashtag we should use?
Michael
Yeah, I mean, well, A, like if you haven't signed up, you can sign up at just our website. It's photoapp.co slash walks, F-O-T-O-A-P-P dot C-O slash walks. And yeah, if you're on photo itself, We have a tag that's just photo walk, F-O-T-O walk.
So if you do post any of your pictures after the walk or you take any iPhone or something, pictures of the group or whatever, just use that tag when you're posting on photo itself. And then if you're like on Instagram or something, just mention us like at, you know, the photo app is our Instagram handle. And we'll try to like reshare those to like our stories over this weekend and next week.
just so people can see and we're just really looking for like uh the community type pictures is what we really want to show and promote is like hey these you know people got together and so we love seeing all the group pictures and things like that um and just people being together in person is is really great that it's the thing that i think a lot
Iain
of us miss i talk about a lot on the show like photography can be quite a solitary thing if you're not careful and you cannot have especially if you do it for your job but if you don't on the one hand that can be quite a nice thing to go out for walks and sort of get a bit of time to yourself but it is nice to kind of get together and nerd out a little bit and go what film you're shooting or what camera you're using or I've got that lens you know just find your tribe a little bit because I think as you get older and I say this is a man who turns 47 this week but it gets harder to meet people right and it gets harder to make friends and it gets harder to do stuff like that so I think this is there were people who came in last year who one attendee in particular was like it was definitely apprehensive about meeting other people and it was a great way to kind of of in a safe way, meet some folks, do something fun, do something you're familiar with. And, you know, there's no pressure. You can punch out at any time and just have a little wander around with your camera. So it's lovely.
Yeah. Last thing I want to kind of touch on is, and it might be a bit broader, I don't know. Around the app, you mentioned like you've launched the web version of the photo.
I nearly said the web version of the app. It's not, but it's more than that. It's, you know, how are you thinking about developing photo from here on out?
and what is the direction of travel that you see for photos? Obviously, you're doing some community events like this. You're adding features all the time.
What's the long-term view?
Michael
Well, yeah, we could talk forever on that one. I'll maybe break it up in a couple segments. So maybe let's look at the rest of 2026 as a short term, and then we can also talk beyond that.
Right now, we are getting ready to release a couple big updates. One is going to be around spam and reporting improvements and protections because we're continuing to grow the user base. And so we're starting to see some bad people trying to do some things on there that we don't love. And so we're ramping up some of our protections to protect the community a bit more, which we're excited about.
And that will make it just a better, safer place for everyone. And then the big feature we're getting ready to release is called series, which is where you can post multiple pictures in a post. So a bit like an Instagram carousel kind of concept, but we're going to call it series.
And it's something that people have been asking for a long time. And so hopefully next week we'll get it out. We'll see.
So we're really close. We're going to do some more testing. The next massive feature is going to be called collections, which is where people will be able to start curating. And so we actually have had this requested for several years now at this point where people are going to like save or like go back to things that they've really enjoyed.
And we just haven't had a feature where you can like collect and save photos that inspire you or that you want to group together for one reason or another. And so that's a pretty massive feature that we've been working on. you know hopefully October November we'll start production on that and so that that's going to feel make it a little bit full a little Pinterest-y in some ways where you can make a collection be like you know black and white landscape and you can name it and then you can search around on the app for black and white landscapes as you find ones you love you can save them to that collection other people will be able to view like your collections you can view other people's collections.
So it should be a great way for you to save inspiration for you. If you want to search for studio portraiture, you can make a collection of that, of other people's work and come back to it. But it's also a good discovery engine for other people because you can see what they're collecting, what other people like, and find some new accounts to follow.
And so hopefully it'll create a really nice flywheel. And it adds another layer of purpose and intentionality
Iain
That must feel markedly different as well to an endless scroll where you search for something. Looking at a collection will naturally have a beginning and an end. So you're not getting stuck into doom scrolling, but you are getting to find that discoverability. That's a really smart, nice way of kind of adding discoverability without adding an endless rabbit hole that you can fall down.
Michael
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, and just people like to curate stuff. And it kind of allows some of, I would say, best of the best work to probably rise up to the top in sort of these different niche categories that people will create.
And then into like 2027 and beyond, 2027 is going to be a heavy year in terms of like search and discovery and like social features. This is going to be a big focus. Because I think we're kind of really focusing on a lot of like presentation and like grouping things and like how to, you know, that type of deal with images and folks.
and discovery and search will be a huge thing for us in 2027. And that will just all play into a role of like that will help that'll just fuel collections because you'll be able to search more and find more stuff you'd collect you'll be able to find other accounts or if you're going on trips being able to like start a collection for some location you're going to or if you're, you know, hopefully unlock we're more like, quote unquote, non photographers, are on photo. So people like a wedding, people, if you're getting married or something, and you want to find a wedding photographer that's in wherever, you know, Dallas, Texas, you could search wedding photographers, Dallas, Texas film or whatever style you want. And brides can start, they can make their own collections of photographers they like or wedding pictures that they like, you know, things for their reception or, so I don't know, we want, you know, creative directors, art directors to be able to utilize this to find, oh, I need a editorial photographer.
in London. So let me search for those people on photo and start, they can make a collection and start saving those types of people that they like and might want to work with in the future. So we just wanted to make it a lot, you know, these flexible tools and features, but people can use them in different ways depending on their use case is kind of our goal.
And then beyond that, we'll, you know, I mean, there's just tons of other features we want to add. Like we feel like we're just still getting started. I mean, even at the end of 2027, I feel like we're still at the beginning of, everything that we could build with photo and make it out to be.
Iain
As you're speaking, what I'm thinking is that podcast hosts who speak to photographers should use it. I could find people to talk to. It's the same thing. I really love that.
Michael
Sounds really good. Yeah, you can make a collection of people you want to interview or a topic of a podcast topic you want to touch on. It's just a lot of things.
We're excited to see how people use them. use that type of feature once we release it. We think it'll be a big, big step forward for the app and the community itself.
Iain
Yeah, brilliant. Well, Michael, for people listening, so we mentioned Photo Walks. Where can they go and find Photo the app online?
Michael
The best place is just go to our website because the direct links and everything are there. So just F-O-T-O-A-P-P.co. And yeah, you'll find a link for Android and Apple just right in the header. and then there's a get started button which takes you to the web version or go to sign in in the navigation menu if you have an account and that will take you directly to the web version and then yeah you're good to go from there and we'll see them on photo yeah exactly