Keep your photo sharing private with Colugo

Now that Bhavna's family -- her parents and her sisters and their spouses -- have moved to our town we are doing a lot more family gatherings. We're celebrating birthdays and accomplishments ( my kids and my nieces are learning tae kwon do ) but mostly getting together because we can. This means a lot of photo and video opportunities mostly caught on iPhones1.

As I noted last month, I've been looking for ways to share and collect those moments beyond the feature set offered by Photo Stream. The requirements are simple. The app needs to allow us to create and add photos to each other's private photo albums and allow those albums to be downloaded later. Colugo gets close.

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Colugo is free in the App Store. Once you register your account, you can create an album and import photos from the Camera Roll or take new photos.

After creating an album, you can choose how you want to share the collection. You can invite contacts from Facebook or by email. Once the other person installs the app, they will have access to the photos.

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You can also choose to share your photos more publicly by posting a link to Facebook or publishing them to your Colugo online profile.

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The one downside to Colugo, when compared to Photo Stream, is there is no desktop app. To download an album, I have to connect my iPhone to my iMac and iTunes and export the photos from there.

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From one perspective, Colugo is an improvement on the sharing options of Photo Stream, and it may be especially useful if you’re privately sharing and collaborating on photos and albums with other iPhone users who have also downloaded the app. However, it's lack of an easy way to download hi-resolution version of images to and from my Mac makes it of limited use at this time.


  1. Apple should give me a commission based on how much stuff I've sold for them.