Irys Photos app - a review of the new Instagram alternative for photographers
Back in the day, everyone who was into photography used Flickr (my account was created in 2005!). This lasted a few years then along came social media, then Instagram.
Despite the domination of Insta, there’s been a regular arrival of new social, photo-sharing products on the market, such as Smugmug, Glass, Foto. These are all pleasant apps to use, but they lack two things that prevent them challenging Instagram in any meaningful way:
- Critical mass of users
- Brand support
Irys is the newest kid on the block hoping to chip into Instagram’s market share and capitalise on many a photographer’s frustration. It’s the brainchild of Alan Schaller who has a huge Instagram following and a burgeoning YouTube channel which makes this product all the more interesting.
I’ve been using Irys for the past three months, and in this post I’ll give you my honest thoughts.
Irys Features
At first glance Irys is very similar to the other Instagram alternatives – you share photos, people follow you, and they can like and comment on your pics . However, there are some crucial differences that I think set Irys apart:
- Upload photos at full resolution, up to 50MB in size (for premium members).
- Upload at any aspect ratio and show full EXIF data (which you can selectively share any part of – nice touch).
- A curated Highlights section that shows 12 new images a day, hand-picked by Irys – great for discovery, given that there’s no apparent algorithm to your feed (it’s purely chronological).
- Monthly challenges (for premium members) to win prizes. The current competition is a street photography one where you can win a £1500 collector’s edition Alan Schaller book. This is very attractive given the cost of entering other competitions such as Lens Culture, or other communities such as Framelines. Nice to have it all baked into one app.
- The presence of leading photographers, such as Alan Schaller, Phil Penman, Josh “spicymeatball” Edgoose, Selaru Ovidiu, and Nina Papiorek. Platforms other than Instagram simply haven’t accomplished this, and it will be an important lever in terms of awareness and product adoption.
- Brand support. Currently Leica is present on the platform, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before other brands like Fujifilm and Sony are on there. Again, this will be massive in terms of awareness and product growth.
The app itself is pretty good. It’s similar to most of the others, as you would imagine. They’ve gone bold with the brand colours which may or not be to your tastes (it has grown on me!), but generally it’s monochrome which I think helps make your photos stand out.
Feed
There’s a feed which is a scrollable list of all the photos from people you follow, in chronological order. This works well, but it can be a little problematic if someone does a massive photo dump since these pictures quickly dominate your feed. It’s not really a big deal, it’s just something I noticed. It’s also something Irys could potentially filter out.
Each photo in the feed is displayed in its original aspect ratio. You can click to comment, and can also click an info icon to see all the details about the photos – which groups it’s in, location (if present) and the EXIF data of the image (if the user has opted to share). I’ve noticed quite a lot of people hide this info, which is a shame as photographers like to nerd out over the settings, but actually a good thing because it respects privacy if you want it.
You can click an avatar to see a user’s profile.
You can see a feed for photos, but also for when photos by people you follow are added to Collections (which are sort of like Albums that you can create on your profile). You can also view updates on the Groups that you’re a member of.
You can “like” photos but Irys have gone a step further with this, offering a variety of ways to show appreciation:
I like the intent here, but as a user I find it a little overwhelming at times. I find the “like” is enough to show appreciation. Sometimes I want to like a photo, but I don’t think it’s “amazing” or has “stunning colours”. I just want to appreciate it, so I find this limited selection oddly more restrictive than a single like button and generally I just default to the “amazing” option.
I’ve become more accustomed to it over time, and I’m sure some people will really love these options, but it feels like an unnecessary complication to me.
Groups
Users (premium only? not sure) can create Groups. I’ve not done a lot of exploration of this, but I’ve joined a few groups such as Street Photography Worldwide.
When you view a group you can see the number of members and images. I tend to look at who created the group. If it was created by Irys then I figure it’s a good one to join, otherwise I’d be driven by popularity. From my perspective, you join these groups because you want to give maximum exposure to your images so it makes sense to join the popular ones, unless it’s some sort of private group or a club group that you want to be a part of.
I run Street Photo Social, a street photography photo walk group in Edinburgh, and I plan to create a group on Irys for this but, as of writing this, there’s a persistent bug that is preventing me. As such I’m not 100% sure if you can limit members and make groups invite only (probably not?), but that would be a nice touch. I will update this post when I have more info.
Groups are a nice touch already for effectively filtering your feed by genre, and I’m sure the functionality will evolve more in the coming months.
Highlights
When you click the Search 🔍 icon, you can see the Highlights section.
This is a selection of great images, curated by the Irys team. It seems to update every few days, and it’s a very useful way of finding new people to follow which is a constant problem with all of these non-algorithmic platforms. I’ve already discovered a bunch of people, so it definitely works.
Profile and Collections
Your profile is very much like on Instagram – your avatar, your bio, and a view of all the photos you’ve uploaded, ordered chronologically. All the photos are arranged using a masonry layout which looks great, retaining the original aspect ratio of the photos. So much nicer than Instagram!
Bios don’t yet support links which is a shame. I can enter ollyheadey.com but it’s just plain text – perhaps the Irys team could add basic autolinking here as I’d like to drive traffic to this website!
You have three tabs on a profile. The first one is Gallery, which is your feed of photos. The second is Groups, which is a list of all the groups you’re a member of, and the third is Collections which is a set of “albums” that you have curated yourself. I’ve created collections called Portfolio for my favourite images, one called Night Vision for my night shots and so on.
One annoyance with Portfolios is that you can’t order the photos, they’re arranged by the date you added the photo which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It would be nice to have the option to sort by date taken (a more obvious default), or even a custom order (although this is niche, IMO). You also can’t select a cover image for a Collection which is a royal PITA. I’m told they’re working on this and it can’t come soon enough!
Spotlight competitions
This is a new feature of Irys and it’s an important one. It’s a premium feature so only paying customers will be able to take part. It’s essentially a monthly competition with a meaningful prize.
You can add up to 3 images a day to the competition group, which seems a little odd to me. Why not limit to 3 for the entire competition? Given that the comp is open for a month, each person could submit nearly 100 images which seems far too many. I think Irys should show restraint here allow fewer submissions like most photo contests do. Perhaps they have their reasons, so we’ll see in time how it works out.
Pricing
With Irys, you are not the product. There is a free plan, but it’s limited and Irys needs people to pay for the product for it to survive. The benefits for the user are no ads and no privacy-invasion, and the cost isn’t that great especially for photographers who are used to paying hundreds every years for Adobe and/or the likes of Squarespace.
The free plan limitations are:
- 10 images a day up to a maximum of 100 in total. So at some point you’ll need to pay, or delete old photos in order to keep posting.
- 2 collections only, each limited to 25 images.
- Join a maximum of 5 groups.
This is fine for kicking the tyres, you can experience most of the app without paying.
The premium plan is (in the UK) £4.99 a month or £49.99 a year, which is what I paid. The benefits of paying are:
- Higher-resolution uploads (up to 50MB!). This is impressive, but it’s not actually a feature I want. Sure, I don’t want it restricted to the 2048px maximum of Instagram, but double that would be more than fine.
- Unlimited photo posting. Again, not for me since I only want to post the good stuff. I’ve been on Instagram for years and still only posted ~800 shots.
- Unlimited Collections.
- Unlimited Groups.
- Start your own Groups. This is a big one for me (if they fix the pesky bug that’s preventing me from doing so!).
- Enter Spotlight competitions. Another big draw for me. I like getting feedback on my work, so entering (and maybe one day winning) a competition is something I like to do.
I think this is reasonably priced and I was happy to pay. A bunch of photographer friends seemed less keen, preferring to wait and see how it plays out.
Shortcomings and pitfalls
It’s early days but I think Irys is a very capable app already, more so than Foto which has a snail-like development pace by comparison. There are a few features I’d love to see added soon though:
- Web access. I want to be able to link to my Irys profile on social media, so having a link to my portfolio at irysphotos.com/@ollyheadey would be amazing. I would also like to operate the app using the website as well, rather than just my phone. You’d think that it uses web-based tech under the hood, so I’m sure it’s going to come at some point.
- Cover photos for collections. This is a must-have.
- Order photos by date taken in a collection. I’d argue this is a bug rather than a feature request.
- Carousels. I really like the carousel feature on Instagram – the ability to have multiple images in a single post. It’s a great way of telling a story, so I’d love Irys to add this.
There’s a glimpse into what they’re working on at https://www.irysphotos.com/roadmap.
Can Irys succeed?
It’s far too early to say whether Irys can be a success, and what does that even mean? It will never compete with Instagram on numbers, so I think success would be to get paying custom numbers into the hundreds of thousands. Running an app at scale, especially one with large data sets like photographs, doesn’t come cheap so Irys will need enough supporters to sustain it. Will people see enough value to pay for it?
The app is already pretty great, so they appear to have nailed the tech. If they can continue onboarding pro photographers – especially luring the influencer variety from Instagram and YouTube – then I think they’ve got a really great chance of doing something meaningful.
That said, there are some things that will hold it back:
- Free plan limits. You need a generous free tier to build the community and have a strong pipeline of people to upsell the premium product to. I wonder if Irys’ free plan is too limiting. What will happen when people hit the 100 image limit? If they don’t become a subscriber, do they disappear? It’s not a problem Irys have to solve right now but this could be an issue soon.
- Failure to get the influencers. If all the great photographers, especially those with influence, stick with Instagram and don’t use Irys, that could be a problem. I don’t actually think this will happen as Alan Schaller seems to have a lot of influence and that could make all the difference. These photographers will go where the people are, so the more people of note who join Irys, you’ll start to see a snowball effect.
- Instagram. Instagram is not photographer friendly any more, but the masses are on there and so are the brands. It wouldn’t be unfeasible for Instagram to flip their current stance on photography if Irys starts to see a lot of traction. If they changed the algorithm and photographers start to get engagement again, that might discourage them from leaving Instagram and not use Irys. I think this is unlikely, because if Irys did get enough traction to spook Instagram then the chances are they’ll have a critical mass of people who won’t be going anywhere.
Conclusion
Having tried literally all the Instagram alternatives, Irys stands leaps and bounds ahead for me. It might have some teething issues and lack a bit of functionality, but they’re moving fast and the community is engaged. I really enjoy using the product, I’m getting engagement (likes and comments) which is what I want out of a platform where I’m showcasing my work – tell me you like it and make me feel good about myself! 😅
It’s worth noting that the app seems to be only a small part of a bigger plan for Irys. Take a look at this from https://www.irysphotos.com/whyisirysdifferent:
We are building Irys not only as a social media platform but as an ecosystem with an in-house magazine (coming in 2026), a book publishing house, an agency and a gallery network.
This is pretty exciting. The Irys business is going to be much more than an app, which will only increase its chances of success.
The future seems bright!
Follow me on Irys @ollyheadey.
