We all love taking photos of our friends and family, and that’s even truer for those with kids. If you’ve got young ones of your own, you’ll no doubt snap pics of every moment of their development and at every special occasion in an effort to document their life stages.

But rarely do we ever do anything with our digital photos. Most often, they remain in our Gallery app or cloud storage vault of choice and get barely a passing glance or, for some, end up being (over)shared on social networks that include friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, people you no longer wish to be in touch with or even strangers. Neither is ideal.

Snapbrite is an app and service from AntTek that aims to make it easier for you to share special moments of your children’s lives with just the people that care and matter most.

When you open Snapbrite for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a basic tutorial for the app and its functions. You’ll then be asked to create an account with your email address, or link your Google+ or Facebook account. What’s really great about Snapbrite is that you can forgo creating an account and actually test out the app with a dummy account before adding any personal details.

Once you’re in, the Snapbrite app is split into four main sections that enable you to share your kid’s special moments and choose who can view them.

The first section is the ‘Family’ tab is where you’ll manage the children you share details about and who can view those updates, as well as invite family and friends. The next tab is ‘Moments’ — this is where you’ll spend most of your time. Here, you can share all manner of updates — photos, audio clips, text-based stories or life events. There are a great deal of ideas for event updates — like first smile, sleeping through the night, or saying “mommy” or “daddy” for the first time. You get a free 1GB upload quota, and this can be extended by successfully inviting new users to the service. It would be nice to see some integration with third-party storage providers like Dropbox/Google Drive to add more space, or the option to purchase more storage within Snapbrite.

Any photo-based media you share will be gathered in the ‘Photos’ tab and will be automatically grouped chronologically, giving you a neat visualization of your child’s development by age. You can also play an automatically generated slideshow of your updates.

The last tab is ‘Growth’. Here’s where you can add height and weight data to compare against global standards from the World Health Organization in order to get a quick view into your child’s development.

The breadth of stuff that is covered by Snapbrite is excellent. The app makes it extremely easy to share you kids’ milestones with family and friends, and the implementation of Material Design in the UI makes it visually appealing and straightforward to use. There’s also a ‘Kids Mode’ that can be activated that enables the young ones to get involved with sharing updates too.

Snapbrite is free, and has no ads. The developer states that this will remain the case forever, and plans to monetize through the sale of custom prints, greetings cards and photo books in the future, which would be a nice addition.

The main difficulty with embracing Snapbrite with something as important as sharing your child’s development is getting your family and friends on board too. For the best experience, you need the rest of your nearest and dearest to get the app too but being Android-only for now that might not be possible. There is a web version for those not using the mobile app, and any update can be shared by a permanent web link which gets around the problem somewhat, but it’s not ideal. Further to that, users will want to know that the service will still be around for years to come in order to invest the time in Snapbrite now, which of course can’t be guaranteed.

If you’re after a mini social network based around your children and made for just your closest family, Snapbrite is worth taking a look at. It’s well made, encourages regular updates and, if you can get your relatives on board, could become the hub for your family sharing!

Check out Snapbrite on Google Play where it is available to download for free or from the Amazon Appstore.

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