Most games ship with a photo mode now, and people spend an hour on one frame in a game they finished two years ago. Then the result goes to Twitter, Instagram or a subreddit, which compress the file, flatten the colour grade and lose track of the game and the person who took it. Picashot keeps the file as you exported it, records the game and platform, and keeps the credit attached.

That set the design brief. The photographs are the product, so the interface stays dark and quiet, while still carrying the game, the platform and the photographer on every shot.

Each game has a page with every photo taken in it, the people who shoot it most and a follow button. You can see what people have got out of a game's camera before you buy it.

A game's photo mode can also be reviewed on its own: how far the camera moves, whether the interface hides, what the lighting controls do. Reviewers attach their own photos as evidence. As far as we know nobody else covers this, and for people who care about it, it's often the deciding factor.

Its main job is crossposting. One photo on Instagram, X, Bluesky and TikTok normally means four exports, four crops, four captions and four uploads. In Studio it's one screen, and it handles each service's limits on aspect ratio, caption length and image count.

It also holds albums, article drafts, view counts and custom domains. We designed the domain flow to walk people through the DNS records one at a time, since most of them have no reason to know what a CNAME is.

People kept trying to fit the mods, the lighting setup and what they were going for into a couple of hundred characters, so we gave them a proper editor for it. Articles sit on your profile next to your photos, and a photo mode review can link out to one.

Over a hundred achievements across bronze, silver, gold and platinum unlock on things like a first upload, a first review or a weekly streak, and add up to a level on your profile. Two daily games are built from community photos: Pixel Hunt, where you guess the game behind a pixelated shot, and Jigsaw, 28 pieces against the clock. Both have leaderboards.

For design, that is the job. One set of components has to hold across the app, the site, Studio, portfolios and Origin, so a photo, a game tag or a credit behaves the same wherever you meet it.

The engineering is Oluwafemi's: an Expo app for iOS and Android, a TanStack Start site, a Node and Postgres API, and an image pipeline on S3 and Lambda.

Around 200,000 photos, about 2,000 more a month, and some people have their own domains pointing at portfolios the app renders for them. It's free, and it's at picashot.co. It's also on the App Store and Google Play, and Origin works for anyone.

The photographs on this page were taken by Picashot users and belong to them. They're pulled from the public community feed and credited the way the platform credits them. Screenshots are from the iOS app, picashot.co and Studio.