Skip to main content

New Polaroid photo app transforms your images into moving moments

Polaroid is taking a swing at social networking with a new photography app that lets you create and share moving images akin to Apple Live Photos.

Polaroid Swing, as it’s known, is a collaboration between tech startup Swing (whose chairman is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone) and the Polaroid brand, owned by PLR Inc.

Recommended Videos

The aim is to take on existing photo and video-sharing giants Instagram (which boasts a similar product in the form of Boomerang) and Vine. The latter’s six-second video loops may seem like an eternity compared to Swing’s one-second moving images.

Despite carrying the iconic Polaroid brand name it will be a tough fight for Swing to carve out a niche in an already saturated marketplace that has seen its fair share of failed products. The app is more than just an attempt to cash in on the nostalgia associated with Polaroid, and its historic standing as a trailblazer in the field of instant photography.

In its favor, Polaroid Swing boasts a clean user interface, the aforementioned social sharing functions (plus the ability to share your posts on external social networks, such as Facebook, and Twitter), and some nifty gesture controls. The latter is its defining feature, allowing you to transform your still images into moving photos with the swing of your wrist. The same motion control is applied to the highlights reel, which also lets you develop new photos with a white flash, an homage to Polaroid’s traditional cameras.

Aside from Stone, the app also lays claim to a renowned development team, including Cole Rise (the man behind Instagram’s early filters, and much-loved original logo), who now serves as an artist in residence for Polaroid Swing. The app itself boasts four filters, which were likely the work of Rise. Additionally, Swing’s R&D lab is jam packed full of tech talent, among them a team of former Apple engineers, and computer vision experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stone himself had some big words for his latest project, comparing it to the social media giant he helped establish. “Polaroid Swing has the potential to change the way we think about images, just like Twitter’s 140 characters changed how we think about words,” said Stone. “People will start seeing the world in one second moments. It’s a genre-defining medium.”

“Human beings see the world in short moments, not in stills or videos,” adds Tommy Stadlen, co-founder of Swing. “Memories move, and now photos do too. The product combines Polaroid’s iconic heritage with cutting edge innovation.”

You can download Polaroid Swing for iOS right now. An Android version is confirmed to be on the way.

Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good
Profile displayed in Ivory app

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Read more
Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them
Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Read more
Having trouble accessing your Instagram account? You’re not alone
Instagram being used on an iPhone.

Instagram appears to be down right now, but the glitch many users are reporting is an odd one. It's not just that users are having trouble accessing the popular photo- and video-sharing app, but they're also having trouble accessing their own accounts and have reported being hit with account suspension notices.

On Monday morning, the apparent Instagram outage was reported by users on Twitter and on Downdetector. Both sites included numerous reports saying that users suddenly lost access to their IG accounts and were given account suspension notices.

Read more