Batch Lets You Share Tons of Photos from iPhone Easily

I love taking photographs and sharing them on Facebook using my iPhone 4. Till last year, it was a tedious process which meant copying pictures to my computer and then uploading them on Facebook. Now, there are several apps which let you publish apps instantaneously on Facebook. However, the unfortunate part – almost all of these apps let you share photos one at a time and they lack bulk upload capabilities. I recently read across Batch – a newly launched iPhone app that claims to be the ‘simplest way to share an album, or batch of photos directly from your phone.’

Once installed, Batch prompts you to connect with Facebook as shown below.

Batch uses Facebook Connect and once you’ve entered your credentials, it asks you to grant permission to access your Facebook profile as shown below.

Once you hit Allow, Batch ticks off your Facebook integration as done. The app then takes a few seconds for a few background tasks and shows a progress indicator as it’s getting ready for use.

When you launch it for the first time, Batch prompts you to upload existing pictures from your iPhone to Facebook. It shows a listing of your camera roll and allows you to select multiple photos as shown below.

You can even edit photos before you publish your batch on Facebook. After you’ve selected the photos, it prompts you to identify your Facebook friends in the selected photographs.

You can then choose the sharing options – whether the batch of photos should be private or visible to your friends. You can also choose to publish a link to the batch on your Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Batch prompts you to enter your credentials in order to share the batch link your Twitter profile as shown below.

If you chose to mark the batch as private, you can explicitly select friends with whom you want to share the pics in that batch.

The main screen of Tab provides a tabbed bar on the bottom featuring 5 tabs – Batches, Feed, Camera, Photos and Me. The tab names are self-explanatory as to what they do.

All in all, it’s a great attempt at building a batch photo uploader for Facebook – great styling, stunning graphics and an intuitive user interface.  However, Batch has several pitfalls. For a start, it’s fairly limited in its social media coverage – only Facebook and Twitter. Second, the app seems to hang every once in a while and has a long startup pause which seems rather irritating. I couldn’t get the ‘Post link to my batch’ working for Facebook or Twitter. I like the concept of Batch but its execution needs to be improved.