In the photo booth world, being able to connect to social media on the internet is the new big thing.

There are many new photo booth stations coming out where that is all they do - you don’t actually get a picture, but you can send it directly to your email, or to Facebook or Twitter, or whatever the new internet sensation of the day happens to be. 

In order to be able to have the pictures sent to the internet, you must have some sort of connection to the internet yourself. 

Perhaps this is thus WiFi at the venue. I have also tethered my cell phone creating a “mobile hotspot”.

Then you need software that will allow this.

The program I am most familiar with is a program called Photo Booth Connected www.photoboothconnected.com which allows you to monitor a folder and when an image is added, it will immediately pop up on the screen and allow you to send the photo to a myriad of places.

I have tested this program out but have only used it sparingly because it slows down the speed at which I can process people through the photo booth.

So, unless a customer is insisting on it, I generally have not been offering it. 

I know what some people have done is to network the main photo booth computer to a print or send station that people can line up separately to send off their photos. This is definitely a solution to the line problem but of course it complicates immensely your entire photo booth setup.

There are many photo booth suppliers out there that simply make photo booths for social media exclusively. For one thing these photo booths are much lighter as there is no printer component and consequently there is no paper and toner cost as well. Many of these photo booths actually use webcams which makes them even lighter. While I generally believe a DSLR camera should be used for most photo booth applications, for the social media booth, in most cases a webcam does do the job.

There will be much more to write in the coming months and years as this whole part of the photo booth market continues to expand.