One special thing about the art of photography is that the joy doesn’t stop after you take the picture. The feeling grows along with time, each and every moment you revisit the past via frames of old images. And your happiness is multiplied if you share the shots with your friends and family.

With so many social networks out there, the distance between us and our loved ones has shrunk to just a few clicks away. Those social networks have become our favorite tools to share images. Our picture taking ability is also enhanced multifold with the availability of good quality digital cameras in our smart phones.

Combine the two and you would get picplz - an mobile photo sharing app that allows you to quickly and easily share your smart phone photos over social networks.

Picture Please!

Even though picplz comes in the form of free iPhone and Android apps, its core is actually a social network that allows users to share pictures among its members. That’s why the first thing that picplz requires you to do before using the app is to register yourself as a member of the picplz social network (or log in if you’ve already a member).

The app also supports several other popular social networks and allows users to link their accounts on those major networks to their picplz account. Currently there are three supported networks: Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook.

The linking process can be done easily from within the application itself and will enable users to “announce” their picture taking status to those networks.

Other pre-required permissions that users should enable prior to using picplz are “using your current location” and “sending push notification“.

Then you are ready to shoot and share. Since picplz relies heavily on the ability to link pictures with locations where they are taken, it will ask you to determine your current location by choosing the nearest spot on the list.

There are two things that you can do after taking pictures using picplz. The first one is adding short captions to your images. This can be done easily by tapping the small blue arrow button at the upper right corner of the display.

The second action would be choosing the image effect that you want to apply to your picture. Tap on the small wand button at the bottom of the display and you will get a list of special effects.

You can experiment with the effect to get the result that you want. Here are examples of some of the effects that you can apply to your pictures.

As long as your phone is connected to the internet, your photos will be uploaded automatically to the picplz network in the background after you tap the “Post” button. Meanwhile, you can continue with your photo session.

Aside from the photos that you take directly using the app, picplz also allows you to use images from your photo gallery. This means that you can utilize picplz as a quick and light image editor to add effects to photos in your library.

The Social Side

There are two sides to this app: your inner circle and everybody else out there. The “people” button will show you images from your personal network (you and your friends), and images from all over the world that you might find interesting.

You can browse all the “interesting” images and do what you commonly do at a social network: you can “Like” the images, make a comment, and see what other people think and say about that particular image.

The “Settings” allow you to customize several things about the app, and also to expand your own social network by searching and adding friends from the picplz network.

In my personal opinion, the app and its social network for image sharing is an interesting way to make your images available to the world. But I would really love to have the ability to add friends from my Facebook account.

If you like mobile photo sharing, you should give this one a try. There’s another similar app called Instagram that you might like.  Let us know which one you prefer.