Brian Pokorny: Why Pick Just One Photo When You Can Share Batches? (Video)

Where, in the past, people might have printed out entire rolls of film, or kept on snapping as many pictures as their memory card would hold, mobile photo-sharing today often seems to be a more choosy sport. We carefully share only the very best photos from our camera phones — one at a time — via email, Facebook, Twitter or a dedicated app like Instagram.

Granted, this probably has something to do with how hard and expensive it has historically been to get our photos off of phones.

But a new iOS app called Batch is aimed at bringing back profligate photo sharing. It encourages users to take as many photos as they want, and to share them all.

Batch makes photo sharing less about the past and more about real-time storytelling, said Brian Pokorny, the CEO of photo-a-day site DailyBooth.

(Pokorny was an early-stage investor with Ron Conway’s SV Angel, until he left to lead DailyBooth last year. DailyBooth is a relatively small photo-sharing site that’s especially popular with young users.)

Unsatisfied with just building mobile versions of DailyBooth, Pokorny’s team came up with the idea of Batch as a “mobile-first” product separate from the main site, he said.

Pokorny said his friend Jack Dorsey, of Twitter and Square, helped inspire the app by suggesting that Pokorny try to distill the joy of photo booths and bring them to phones.

On Batch, users can create albums (“Batches”) and then continue to add to them as they snap more photos. Their friends can then tag along and see an event unfolding as it happens. Each Batch is like a living photo album.

There are also all the normal social features, like a feed of most-recent albums and a feed of new comments and uploads, with tight Facebook integration to alert friends about new photos being added, and to encourage them to join Batch.

“We’re changing from using the camera to archive to using the camera to communicate,” explained Pokorny.

Here’s a video interview with Pokorny, shot at the DailyBooth/Batch offices this week: