I got early access to Irys this week, a new app created by Leica ambassador and photographer Alan Schaller.
If you don't know of Alan, he is also a co-founder of Street Photography International and runs a popular YouTube channel. If you're looking for a taster, his Street Photography in Paris is a good place to start.
Irys positions itself as a photographer-first alternative to mainstream social apps. It's differentiating itself by emphasising a singular focus on stills contrasted to Instagram, whose algorithm is not only highly volatile but the platform has pivoted aggressively toward a reels-first focus to compete with TikTok. Static photo content has 40–60% lower reach than it did in 2021 and Meta is unashamed and devoid of subtlety in rewarding paid promotion over organic reach. F-stoppers produced a good summary in their article 5 Rules Photography 'Rules' that Social Media Destroyed that offers a good overview but it's enshittification per Meta's standard playbook.
The Irys app is advertiser free. It's organised around posts, groups and collections and is intuitive and easy to use. I've initially had a few issues creating a collection - the interface shows interaction feedback, but the function was unresponsive and failed to associate the images. Likely a teething issue. Interface feedback should prompt the user if there are conditions such as minimum image requirements. You do get a greater sense of Irys when you setup a feed flow and even more so when you follow a few people or join a group.
Irys has broader ambitions than being a purely social media platform; there are future plans for agency representation, gallery collaborations, book publishing and a photography magazine. There is further detail on the site – Why is Irys Different? As a product, it's entering an already saturated market on all fronts, and while there is an opportunity to harness the negative sentiment towards the likes of Meta and the enshittification of Instagram, this in itself offers no guarantee of adoption.
The cost of the platform is £49.99 annually or £4.99 per month, representing a 16% cost saving if you want to be in a committed relationship. I've not been presented with a demand for payment, so I'm not sure if the free membership tier will persist but I think it's vital to build community (and conversion) and there are no apparent limitations. Becoming a premium member offers the facility to upload high-resolution images (up to 30MB now, 50MB later) and offers unrestricted post volume, collections, group membership, and you can facilitate your own groups if that's your thing. At scale, group fragmentation or duplication may impact the user experience.
Irys is looking to build a community free of the dark patterns of Meta et al. but is also positioning itself as a place to be discovered. There is little evidence of a specific focus on this last part in terms of unique features versus content curation. Requiring any commissioning editor to register to discover work feels like an impediment to use and I don't know what Irys' plans are to build this audience. But I may be premature in casting judgement at launch.
I'd also focus on scaling the community before augmenting core features, and this prioritisation makes sense – unless there is content, there is nothing to see. I'd really like see a roadmap or feature backlog to understand their ambition in this area. But setting expectations and keeping promises is hard, particularly if investors are involved and even more so if they're impatient.
Social cohesion is the greatest challenge, but given that Allan has developed a significant audience through both Street Photography International and his personal social media, he has access to a targeted and engaged audience in excess of at least 1M users (allowing for de-duplication, bots). This is a genuine scaling advantage out the gate. Indications are positive that the platform has the potential for cultural differentiation and community cohesion on this basis, so the challenge will be in registration and paid conversion.
But there is the tedium of switching fatigue – you don't have to look much further than Twitter > Mastodon > Bluesky > Threads. It's rare to achieve the same social density quickly enough to overcome the inertia of migrating all your content. Multi-homing fatigue is equally exhausting, particularly if you factor in time spent participating in the community. Meta employs numerous dark patterns and builds barriers to exit, including proprietary APIs to make data portability difficult so it can continue to monetise users like battery hens. At the moment, you can upload 3 images at a time but tellingly, the interface says 'For now, three images max'.
Initial Thoughts
- The app is intuitive and responsive with the occasional glitch (interface failed to load or interface was unresponsive) but it could be a feature of updating to iOS 18.6. Restarting the app resolved with minimal fuss. Admittedly, it's under light load in soft launch, but once it scales, it'll need to maintain performance. It looks like Irys is taking the right approach – emphasising speed, stability, and user experience over superfluous features.
- Having a photographer's voice in the product and one with community ties to users will ensure Irys focuses on the right things (i.e. not compromising the integrity of images by compressing them to destruction) but this needs to be balanced with investment in the technical infrastructure.
- I don't see the value of uploading high resolution images personally - the compression argument is obvious but there is a law of diminishing returns governed by the hardware device the app is being used on. I think the highest resolution device on the market right now is Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (3120 x 1440) although I don't know if it has the highest pixel density. Taking that as the high watermark, that means an uncompressed file of 12.85MB and in JPG with maximum quality, no more than about 6MB.
- It provides flexibility and control over images - whether comments are permitted or EXIF data is displayed. Irys won't manipulate the image to suit the platform either by forcing a crop nor will they compress images.
- The market is hugely crowded and fragmented, for the app and for discrete parts of their future plans. Network effects will cause hesitancy in moving to the new platform I suspect. Irys needs to invest in converting users to paid memberships and build network effects. I'm not convinced right now that the service fee is worth it. Unless I see evidence of features to court editors or some indication of their presence; I have a portfolio website with advanced analytics which I don't get from the app, what is Irys's differentiator?
- Fotos and Glass have very similar propositions and are bootstrapped. I'm assuming that Irys is too. I have accounts on both of these platforms and couldn't tell you the last time I logged in.
- I'm not convinced about presenting the option of metadata (EXIF data) when an image description is offered. I appreciate you can turn it off or edit it, but it fosters the inanity of 'forum gear chat' and I'd argue it just creates noise in the interface. But it worked for Flickr and costs little in feature development. Irys does feel like it wants to be a broad church and there is argument in courting Flickr community members by offering the familiar.
- I really don't love the 'Austin Powers Groovy Baby' psychedelic aesthetic, and the iconography lacks refinement for my taste. It's distracting, and the colour palette is quite jarring. Particularly when the green/purple gradient is introduced together. On typography, losing contrast significantly impacts legibility and usability so for functional purposes, I would not translate the brand identity into this. I think the artist formerly known as Prince would have liked it though. Conversely, I think it reflects a little of Alan's quirky personality – what I know of him (parasocially), at least and that's not a bad thing. While the style might pair with his monochrome aesthetic, it's a bit lurid and will be visually tiring when you're navigating feeds of colour work.
- I couldn't see a way to share my profile suggesting the platform will be a walled garden. For a professional user, it predicates an audience within Irys to achieve discoverability or recommendation.
I wish the team at Irys luck, any underdog app centred in ethical design principles and community interest is a positive thing. I'm always willing to champion a product that works to unseat Emperor-Bro Zuckerberg.
Find me on Irys under the username 'alxblk' if you're minded to join. I think I'll write a follow up in six months.
