(tl;dr) On October 31, 2024, ShutterPilot will cease operations. All photos that were sent with Photo Hub will be deleted and all the systems will be taken offline.
It was a great run, but sadly it is no longer sustainable and it’s time to pull the plug.
Alternative Options
Software: There are a lot of great options for Photo Booth software out there, but I recommend two in particular.
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Social Booth from Photo Booth Solutions is the photo booth software that Picturebooth used until I wrote Capture in 2016. It was one of the first that sent photos via text and email and allowed nearly direct sharing to social media.
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dslrBooth is a modern-feeling option that I’ve been impressed with for a while (I think I mentioned this in a video as well) and seems to work really well.
Hardware: Honestly, I have no recommendations for hardware. Many vendors sell hardware with their own software (none of which is as good as the options above) and most off-the-shelf photo booths seem to be optimized for a low price point (meaning poor-quality components, cheap build, and very little in the way of physical customization). I recommend you build your own, perhaps by following the recommendations here.
The History
In 2013 (or thereabouts), a company called Picturebooth started building extremely high-quality photo booths. The founder was in college, DJing (with a photo booth) and trying to start a ski rack company. At a trade show (where he had also brought his photo booth), he realized that people were more interested in taking pictures with his photo booth than they were with his ski racks.
After a pivot to focus on building durable photo booths out of the same materials that A/V equipment road cases are made from, he started selling and renting to parties and music tours through his contacts in Nashville.
In 2014, he met me in Colorado Springs and we started brainstorming ways to leverage my software skills to scale his business. The following year we became partners and started building photo booth software both for the actual photo booths and for a cloud infrastructure that would manage the photo booths’ configuration and the social aspects.
Unfortunately, after a couple years the company was struggling. I found a new job in 2017 and the founder all but closed down Picturebooth over the next two years.
In mid-2019, I became aware that Picturebooth was no longer operating and there was a need among owners of those photo booths for something to provide a simiilar cloud-based bridge between the photos taken on the devices and the SMS/email/social sharing that they’d been excited to purchase. I started ShutterPilot and built a quick “shim” in a few days that replaced the old cloud system (I’d actually started work on a new photo booth application, but it wasn’t far enough along to replace Capture), winning over several of Picturebooth’s former customers.
With 2020 came the COVID-19 pandemic, but not before I’d had a chance to purchase the rights to all the software I’d built for Picturebooth, as well as the domain names it was all running on. By that point, the ShutterPilot versions were running a lot better and had some new features that worked better for me, like a virtual photo booth that at the time I was using solely as a way to test that the email and SMS capabilities were showing the right messaging and colors for a given event.
Unfortunately, the pandemic put an end to in-person events for a while. Most, if not all, of the folks who had paused their subscriptions during the lockdown never renewed: many sold their photo booths or decided they would no longer be using them. Pre-pandemic, I had even considered building photo booths to rent out for local events, but the uncertainty of in-person events forced me to scrap that plan and focus on other things.
ShutterPilot never recovered. The events landscape is very different now than it was in 2019 and the vision I had for ShutterPilot no longer aligns with the market and it no longer captures my attention like it did from 2016 to 2019. On top of that, my last customer informed me they would not be renewing, so it’s time to say goodbye to a chapter of my enterpreneurial journey.
And Now?
My enterprenuerial focus is Synapse Software, where I’m building no-code development tools for IT and business process automation. It’s like an integration platform mixed with a reporting platform: it connects with other systems really easily and provides a UI where you can also see and manipulate the data, not just shuttle it from one system to another.
To fund the development of that platform, I’m also selling Cortex, which provides users of the Cherwell Service Management platform (the application I worked on after I left Picturebooth) with a familiar interface to the data and workflows they had created in the original platform (since it’s going away in a couple years).
Something else that could be on the horizon is Glassminnow (warning: link may be broken because I might not have made the web site yet!). One of the really cool things I did at Picturebooth was to build a completely custom ERP tool. However, as our needs as a business got more complex, I started making our tool more and more customizable so our various departments could adapt the tool as needed to support any pivots we were making. I feel like there’s still a need for a “small business ERP solution” and maybe sometime I’ll dust off the code base I’ve since renamed “glassminnow” and make it available for sale.