If you have an iPad or Mac, you’re probably familiar with Photo Booth, an app used to take photos and video with the devices built-in camera. But despite the application being made by Apple, they didn’t make it available on iPhone. Their most popular device with their most advanced camera system.
So why doesn’t iPhone have a photo booth? Well, it’s because of the device’s popularity that Apple wanted to do something a little different. You see, Photo Booth was first released in 2005 to show off the Max’s new built-in insight camera. Users could play around with effects like XRAY thermal camera and colored pencil, then capture photos or video. It was popular with customers at the Apple Store but didn’t really have a practical use.
There were no social media apps like Snapchat or Instagram and Facebook wouldn’t become popular for several more years so all the pictures users captured with photo Booth were sort of stuck on their Mac with nowhere to be shared. But once the iPhone and App Store were released, social media apps offered users the perfect place to share their photos. Videos so it seemed obvious for Apple to create a photo booth app for iPhone, right? Well, they considered the idea, but ultimately decided against it. Photo Booth was developed in a much different time for a much different purpose. For example, it only applied effects to photos and video captured in real-time.
There was no way to import or edit existing images, not to mention the lack of customization. Users couldn’t change the aspect ratio to accommodate different social media platforms, and there was no way to add. Overlay text or background audio. All these features were standard in photo apps like Snapchat and Instagram, so Apple knew they needed to do more than simply release their outdated photo booth app on iPhone. Instead, they created a new app called clips which included all the features users expect from a modern photo app that filtered like in a photo booth but elevated to a new level like augmented reality effects that utilized the light of the iPhone. Our scanner or 360-degree selfie scenes. That put users in the center of a virtual environment. So while we’ll probably never see Photo Booth on iPhone, Apple did modernize the concept with the Clips app.
