I started using Glass recently after listening to a Talk Show episode with the founders. Glass is a new, paid-only photo-sharing app. It’s only on iOS for now, with plans of a web version coming soon. But to properly talk about why I love Glass, you have to take a short history detour with me.
I’m a hobbyist photographer, and you can trace my love for this hobby back to my high-school days some twenty years ago. I bought a Canon PowerShot when Flickr was the rage and I failed miserably to teach myself the principles of photography multiple times. I tried to resuscitate my passion for photography numerous times and pushed hard to turn this love into actual practice. It took many years, and eventually Instagram came around. It brought photography to the masses in a way Flickr couldn’t, and now that everyone had a pocket camera at all times, photography turned from something I flirt with privately on the side to a hobby that even my mother and non-artist friends dabbled in.
The democratization of photography through easy access (of equipment and of sharing) was a huge boon for me. I eventually upgraded to a Fujifilm X100T and learned to keep it on aperture-priority mode; this ensured that I can get the kind of wide-aperture shots that I always dreamed of taking, the ones with a soft background and creamy bokeh, without going head-first into understanding every single technical detail. That knowledge slowly came with time and practice, as I taught myself through a few books and dozens of YouTube videos and articles.
I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a professional photographer — all I wanted to do was to share photos with my small circle of friends and online followers. Instagram, however, slowly morphed to become a service that incentivizes engagement at the detriment of everything else. The algorithmic timeline buries certain posts in favor of other, more engaging ones. Photographers started doing more videos, reels, stories, and everything in between just to stay active (to the algorithm) and to have their stuff propped up on people’s timelines. But I didn’t want to learn videography. I really love photography and I wanted to focus on just that. I noticed that my posts were seldom seen (even to the people who follow me!) because I wasn’t interacting with Instagram’s other video tools more. To the algorithm, I’m a boring type of user.
That slowly killed my desire to want to share photos. I mean, I kept doing it on both Twitter and Instagram, but only sporadically. I found solace in sharing snapshots of my days and trips through Instagram Stories rather than a full-blown ~Photography~ post on the feed. And I noticed something interesting happening: I have been trained to feel incentivized to share more Story posts because I get more comments on them, and these Stories tend to be quick, rather mediocre snapshots and nothing more. They’re not methodical explorations of photography, nor do they come with a lot of intentionality about practicing this hobby that I love. I even changed my default iPhone aspect-ratio to 16:9 so that the way I see the world through my iPhone would mirror the way my photos would look like on my Stories — no cropping required.
It was grim. It’s the equivalent of binging candy and chocolate bars. There are harmful effects to this kind of fun. I had this massive, 12K-and-growing Lightroom library that I didn’t feel an urge to edit nor share because Instagram doesn’t care about it. I never lost my enthusiasm for the hobby, but I wished for more ways to share my photos to other people. Like I said, I’m not a professional and thus my goals aren’t necessarily about wanting to reach a mass of audience to sell my expertise. I simply wished for that long-lost era of genuine connection and inspiration that the early days of the web — forums, Flickr, early-days Twitter — brought with them.
Then I came across Glass, a paid-only photography app. There are no ads (because it’s paid!), no videos, no stories, and no algorithmic feed. Remember when we used to follow people and then our timeline becomes those people’s posts in chronological order? That is what Glass is. You cannot doomscrool in Glass. There are no retweets or reshares. You won’t find the latest social media controversy there. There are no main characters in Glass. Even the type of politics that you encounter — photos of activists or rallies, etc — are ones that bring a kind of beautiful introspection with them. Nothing is posted there for Maximum Engagement.
There are also no like counts. You can send appreciations (their version of likes) on a post that inspired you or a comment that you liked, but there’s no way for other folks to see them — only the original author of that photo or comment can know about your appreciation. You could tap on an amazing photo and there are only one or two comments on it. That photo might have received hundreds of appreciations, but you don’t see that. It’s as if the app is telling you that that isn’t really the point. Don’t obsess over other people’s metrics. But also: don’t obsess over your own metrics.
And, you know, it works. Because of course it does. I noticed that I’m never comparing myself with other photographers on Glass based on metrics like follower counts or likes because those don’t exist there. I’m engaging with photos and people with a more honest approach. Often times I would come across a photo that makes me stop. It could be the way the light is hitting the leaves on a tree, or the way certain compositional elements make me feel. I tap on the photo and look at the EXIF data, which Glass automatically pulls from uploaded photos. I learn a little bit more about what went into creating this photo that made me stop and look. I tap on the appreciation symbol to send the photographer my regards.
I’m also noticing that I’m not comparing my own posts. I don’t look at any of my photos and wonder why it has 100 more likes than this other, better (in my view) photo. Since the app doesn’t even show me my own numbers, it deemphasizes their impact. I do feel the appreciation of other people’s appreciations, but they pass through me like a wave. When I visit my own profile tab in the app, I’m occupied with how my photos make me feel, not the likes count. It’s a stark contrast to how using Instagram feels, where I’m constantly wondering why certain posts have more likes or comments.
Another thing I noticed is how genuine the interactions feel on Glass. I follow a person and I send them appreciations not because of what they could do for me, but based on my photographic instincts. I don’t find myself thinking “oh, this person has 10K followers so I suppose I should follow back because maaaybe there will be a benefit for me down the line.” Because let’s be honest, that does happen on Twitter and Instagram more than we wish to admit. The lack of metrics on this app is an astoundingly smart design decision — the kind of user-centric design that comes from actually exploring what would make a social app tick for other photographers. And this kind of in-app experience could only have arrived from folks who know all these trappings from using other social media apps.
Furthermore, Glass has a much slower pace of content. Sure, I could always explore photography categories and deep-dive there. But my feed is only ever moving at a few photos a day. I noticed that I often click on one of the photographers I follow and observe their photos that I like more than once. As in, I’d open my favorite shots of them and I just look at them and admire them again. When has that ever happened with an Instagram post? Hell, Instagram gives us a bookmark feature precisely for that, yet even then I rarely visit the photos that I bookmark. It’s because Instagram has a much faster pace. It’s always in motion. I’m always looking at the next thing — constantly, with no rest. If I dare to exit the app and enter again mere a minute later, my feed refreshes with more algorithmic content. That keeps me in a different flow and a different state of mind. I become a ferocious consumer, not a curious observer. It’s designed to behave this way and to make us feel this way so that we scroll more and see more ads along the way. It really is interesting to see what a photography app could be when you remove that incessant need to scroll and generate more ad money from users.
I’ve only been using Glass for a few days, and I already made new friendships that are primarily based on art — not on networking. I follow people because their art inspires me, and I can feel the reciprocity back from them. There really is no other agenda. Glass took me back to the early days of the web, when simply connecting with likeminded folks was a gift in and of itself. I didn’t know that this was what I needed – to feel the heartbeat of my photography love – until I started sharing my photos there. I’m excited to see how the makers of Glass will compound on this experience in the future.
