Picashot

Most games ship with a photo mode now, and it's usually a free camera with aperture, focal length, exposure and lighting controls. People use them properly. They'll spend an hour on one frame in a game they finished two years ago.

The results end up on Twitter, Instagram or a subreddit, which compress the file, flatten the colour grade you spent that hour on, and lose track of both 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.

The design brief fell out of that. The photographs are the product, so the interface has to stay dark and quiet and get out of their way, while still carrying the game, the platform and the photographer on every shot.

The rest of this is what got designed and built around that, and how some of it works.

Games get their own pages: cover art, every photo taken in them, the people who shoot them most, and a follow button so new work shows up in your feed. There are a few thousand of them. Cyberpunk 2077 has over twelve thousand photos on its own.

It also works as a way to decide what to play next. If you want to know whether a game is worth playing with the camera out, you can look at what people have already got out of it.

The review covers the camera: how far it moves, whether you can hide the interface, what the depth of field control actually does, whether the lighting settings change anything. It's a five-star rating with sub-scores for each of those, plus a written review. Reviewers attach their own photos as evidence, so you can see what they got out of the tools rather than taking their word for it.

As far as we know nobody else covers this. Game reviews don't mention photo mode, and for people who care about it, it's often the deciding factor.

The main thing it does is crossposting. Putting 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: pick the platforms, add the images, write the caption once and adjust it per platform if you want. Each service has its own limits on aspect ratio, caption length and image count, and Studio handles those. TikTok took the longest to build, because its photo posts publish asynchronously: you submit, then poll for the result.

The rest of Studio is albums, article drafts, per-day view counts, and connecting a custom domain. 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.

It handles covers, headings and inline images. What people write with it are guides, breakdowns, photo essays and reviews. Articles sit on your profile next to your photos, and a photo mode review can link out to one.

There are over a hundred achievements across bronze, silver, gold and platinum tiers, unlocking on things like your first upload, your first review, or keeping a weekly streak going. They add up to points and a level on your profile. Weekly challenges give people a prompt to shoot against.

There are also two daily games built out of community photos. Pixel Hunt shows a heavily pixelated photo and you guess which game it's from. Jigsaw cuts one into 28 pieces and times you putting it back together. Both reset daily and both have leaderboards.

For design, that list is the job. One set of components and patterns has to hold across all of them, so a photo, a game tag or a credit looks and behaves the same whether you meet it in the app, on the site, in Studio or on somebody's portfolio.

The engineering is Oluwafemi's. It started as an Android app in Kotlin, because that's what he knew. A year later he rewrote it in Expo so it could run on iOS too. That meant one codebase for both platforms and over-the-air updates, so a fix can reach people the same day instead of waiting on a store review.

The website has been rewritten twice. Next.js, then Next.js again, and it now runs on TanStack Start. The site is mostly image loading and data fetching, and Start handles both without getting in the way.

The backend is a Node API split by feature with Postgres behind it. Images are the expensive part. An original goes to S3, a Lambda picks it up and generates five sizes with Sharp, and a webhook writes the URLs back when it's finished. Uploads don't wait for any of that. Perceptual hashes and CLIP embeddings are generated on the same path.

Around 200,000 photos, about 2,000 more a month, and a community that's been around long enough that we recognise most of the names. Some people have their own domains pointing at portfolios the app renders for them.

It's free, and it's at picashot.co. You don't need an account to look around. 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.