White Album app turns your iPhone into a disposable camera

It wasn’t too long ago that all of our precious moments moments were captured on photographic film. Rather than snapping a photo of everything that sparked an interest, you would carefully pick and choose each frame on your 24-shot roll and then hope you got the pictures you wanted as you waited impatiently for the prints to come back.

In the last decade and a half, as digital cameras and smartphones have become the norm, we’ll take gigabytes of photos of certain events and then sort through the blurry garbage for the usable pictures at a later stage. If this particular evolution in personal photography irks you, then White Album is your new favourite application.

The idea is simple: it’s essentially a disposable camera for your phone. You’ll capture unedited photos using the dedicated White Album camera app, which doesn’t allow retakes or image previews. Then, once you’ve taken 24 photos and payed the required $20 for processing, your photos will be shipped to you. You’ll see them for the first time when they arrive at your door in hard copy.

The downside is that by using the dedicated White Album camera, you don’t have access to all of your normal camera settings or filters. It’s also almost prohibitively expensive (a disposable camera is not $20 and a lot of the time you can get them with processing fees built into the price). Sure, the “time capsule” aspect of it is kind of nice, but it’s no match for the cloud so you’ll inevitably miss moments that you wish you had captured. That would just make me want to use both White Album and my regular camera app, which would make me wonder why I wasn’t using one of the many applications that allow you to select 24 or 36 photos for print processing.

White Album is available as a free download from the App Store. Each set of prints costs $20 but worldwide shipping is free.

[source]White Album[/source]