If you have seen The Hangover films, then you probably know the best part is during the ending credits, when the guys look back on the pictures they took from the night before to reveal all the hilarious shenanigans they got themselves into. Now, you too can relive your wild party nights with friends by using this time-delayed photo-sharing app.
Flashgap allows users to invite a group of friends to a shared album, where all the members get to take photos and video that disappear after three seconds. Essentially the reverse Snapchat, all the users who are part of that specific event's album then get to see the various pictures taken by themselves and their friends at noon the next day.
"When you take photos on Flashgap, you can't see them. There is this excitement that you have, and it's actually like that feeling we had when we were young and we used to take pictures with cameras and had to wait a week to go and print those photos out and then discover," Flashgap CEO Julian Kabab told Tech Times. "That's the real experience, discovering together at the same time what happened last night."
Unlike Snapchat, the album stays live in the app exclusively for those friends added in the event, so they can relive their nights at any time. Users can use the favorite option, so that all their favorite photos are in one centralized spot. Friends are able to comment on photos and videos taken, providing that Hangover moment when they can read their friends' reactions.
In the app's latest update, users can now comment with a zoomed-in portion of a photo (such as someone's face who photobombed the photo) using the crop feature, which is just another fun — and funny — way to reminisce on the previous night.
What's interesting about Flashgap is that, although it is a photo-sharing app, users cannot share the contents of the albums on other social media networks. That means you won't wake up the next afternoon from a college party and see that someone tagged you in photos that aren't so flattering.
"Flashgap is an app that you use with a primary group of friends — many of the albums are done between five and 10 people. And lots of the albums are created on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and they are often party albums," Kabab said. "So, we just didn't want our users to be afraid that all these pictures would end up on social media the next day."
While you might post a pic on Instagram with your friends with red cups in hand, you might not necessarily want your family members or boss seeing you take shots on Friday night. While this is a great way to make sure whatever happened last night stays with the group, it also prevents friends from blasting out the same photos but from different angles on social media. Instead, Flashgap provides different digital perspectives of the same night shared in a different way.
It also means that you can spend less time on your phone and more time living in the moment. In today's selfie culture, it appears like a fun night never happened if there isn't some form of digital proof of it. However, by spending all that time looking down at our phones, we might miss out on the special moments that are right in front of us.
Instead of searching for that perfect Instagram filter for 10 minutes, users now just enjoy the night with each other. Plus, discovering all the photos taken the next day makes it fun and exciting to look back and share stories with our buddies. Since all friends invited to an event can see the images or videos, you won't need to beg your friend to text you that selfie you wanted or have them email or add the files to Dropbox.
While this app brings that photo montage in The Hangover to life, Kabab revealed that the app was inspired by real-life college events where he and his friends would strap a GoPro onto their heads and pass it around to capture their college parties.
"The next day, we used to all wake up in the same flat and we used to plug in the GoPro and see the footage from last night, and this is exactly how I got the idea," Kabab said.
The app's beta launched in the UK six months ago, and users have already uploaded over two million photos and videos. Flashgap announced on Tuesday that it just closed a round of funding with $1.5 million in the U.S.
Flashgap is available to download for free for iOS and Android.
