Joy today announced the launch of the Joy Album, the world’s first interactive photo album that allows users to curate and share their favorite photos with friends and family. Designed to live on your coffee table and sit comfortably in your lap, the Joy Album makes your most cherished moments instantly viewable in gorgeous layouts, finally modernizing the lost art of creating a physical photo album. Designed by a team that hails from Apple, Sonos and Yahoo, the Joy Album aims to be the premium all-in-one photo solution for families. Joy has been in stealth mode since February and is now taking preorders for the Joy Album device, which will begin shipping in summer 2017.
The Joy Album is the only photo-sharing device with a touchscreen display, wireless charging, customizable photo and video layouts and real-time story sharing. The device will retail for $499 (Joy is offering a limited time discount for the first batch of pre-orders at $299) and pairs with a mobile app that will launch in early 2017, easily integrating photos and videos via email, Facebook, Instagram and more. The Joy Album automatically backs up photos and videos to the cloud, so your precious memories are safe.
“As new parents with tons of pictures and memories to share, we missed the days of sitting with family members and flipping through physical photo albums,” said Joy co-founder and CEO Alan Chan, in a statement. “The need for family members to connect in this way still exists, but our photos have become scattered across different devices and apps. We were inspired to solve this modern problem by creating one beautiful, easy-to-use device that allows users to curate and share memories with loved ones near and far.”
The company, co-founded by Alan Chan, Jacqueline Yuen, Joe Moak and Jonathan Rainey, is also announcing $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Obvious Ventures, BoxGroup, The Chernin Group and Maywic Select Investments. Although 79% of photos will be taken with a phone by 2017 (according to InfoTrends), the sharing, organization and display of photos remains fragmented. Joy was created to solve this problem and disrupt several industries, including online photo printing ($2 billion), photo frames ($900 million), and personal cloud storage ($80 billion).
“I’ve been working on consumer photo sharing for almost two decades and I believe Joy is the first complete solution for family photos,” said James Joaquin, co-founder of Obvious Ventures and former co-founder and CEO of Ofoto, in a statement. “As families take more pictures and videos across more devices, Joy comes to the rescue with a seamless combination of software and hardware that makes private photo sharing easy again.”
The Joy Album offers the following features:
• Beautiful album layouts that showcase photos and videos on a large 13.3” HD touchscreen
• Integration of photos from all the places you store them digitally, from your smartphone camera roll to Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and Google Photos
• Support for several file formats, such as HD videos, raw files, GIFs, 360 degree photos, panoramas and more
• 10 GB of free photo storage with optional upgraded plans
• Proprietary magnetic stand for wireless charging and quick access, with a 5-hour battery life
• Private sharing to allow you to select exactly who can view your photos at any given time
• StoryTime feature that allows families to share photos and tell stories in real time on their own Joy Album devices
For more information or to pre-order the Joy Album, visit: https://joy.co/.
Source: Joy Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: This looks like a great present for the grandparents’ Christmas 2017.
What does this do that an iPad can’t with specialized software?
Agreed. At first I thought this was an iPad app.
The 16:9 aspect ratio for the screen is really nice, and does set it apart from the iPad.
The voice communication could be problematic, as it would require two devices to interact with the grandparents…I didn’t see anything on the joy.co FAQs regarding whether or not a primary user device is required to share with other devices. If this were required, it would be a deal-killer for me.
As someone that’s been looking for something like this for my Mom, who’s in her 80’s, this seems like it has some real promise.
A few years ago there was a dearth of photo-sharing photo frames, that connected to your home internet – or your parents in my case, and we were able to send photos to the frame from anywhere.
My parents loved it, but Kodak stopped making theirs, as did a couple of other companies.
This is the only thing I’ve seen since then that might answer some of those needs again.
And I think you’re right d, I’m sure someone could create an App that does something similar – or exactly like this on an iPad, but for my Mom at least, she really needs a one dimensional device.
I pre-ordered, we’ll see what it’s like next summer.
Don’t do it! If your mom is anything like my grandmother, if you get her one of these things it is going to mean endless tech support calls from her because it won’t turn on or she can’t get it going. There is nothing worse that doing blind tech support over the telephone. Trust me on this one. 😉
this sounds like a high-end photo frame at 5x the current market price for photo frames? Not sure why they think they are going to disrupt free online photo sharing with a $500 tablet.
Exactly..soon to be on sale at Sharper Image
NOPE
This seems very, very, very lame.
No thanks.
As a father of four, I’ve got a lot of pictures of my kids stored on my iPhone. Space-wise and privacy-wise it makes sense for me to have another device for photos. I just pre-ordered a Joy album and I’m looking forward to using it this summer.