Polaroid is back with a new photo sharing app called Swing

The app wants its users to share one-second 'moments'

Polaroid's signature product: the SX-70 system

It’s amazing it hasn’t happened before now, but Polaroid is getting involved in instant photo sharing with an all new photo-sharing app called Polaroid Swing.

Having come into the photo-sharing game fairly late it wasn’t going to be enough for Polaroid to simply allow users to share still snaps. To stand apart from the rest a photo-sharing app has to offer something slightly different. Polaroid Swing’s something different is that its images are actually one-second silent videos.

This means that users are able to drag their finger across their phone screen or tilt the phone itself to see more of the image and its movements. When an image is featured on the web running your mouse cursor will make it move which you can test on the image below:

The app is the result of a development partnership between the iconic photography brand Polaroid and a Silicon Valley-based startup called Swing, whose chairman, and one of its primary investors, is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Stone sees the one second limit on the videos being one of the app’s great strengths, saying “Polaroid Swing has the potential to change the way we think about images, just like Twitter's 140 characters changed how we think about words. People will start seeing the world in one second moments. It's a genre-defining medium.”

Videos are captured at a rate of 60 frames per second with frame blending algorithms developed by the company adding more frames after the capture to ensure movement is smooth and seamless.

Once their image is captured, users label it and have a choice of four filters to add before sharing it on the Swing app as well as through Facebook, Twitter, or email.

When a Swing post is shared on another platform, it links back to the website so that others can see it without having to download the app for themselves. Swing users can follow each other on the app, but its design is fairly minimalist and there’s currently no way to comment on posts.

Tommy Stadlen, a co-founder of Swing says that the idea behind the app is that “Human beings see the world in short moments, not in stills or videos. Memories move, and now photos do too" adding that the app "combines Polaroid's iconic heritage with cutting edge innovation.”

Image sharing is a crowded market, but with its extremely limited video lengths Polaroid Swing just might have found an interesting though extremely small space between apps like Vine and Instagram, giving people the ability to create something akin to a very personal GIF.

Right now, Polaroid Swing is available for free as an iOS app, with an Android version reportedly in development though there’s no set release just yet.