A picture says a thousand words

Online chatting has taken an interesting and different turn with picture chat. Friends can send snapshots to one another that often express much more than just text. Snapchat allows you to do just that – messaging but only using images. And this is surely working as recent estimates have put the number of shared Snapchat photos to about five million a day.

Since Snapchat’s image chat can also be used for a questionable type of image chatting, the developers have enabled three safety features that allow relatively safer image sharing. The first feature is that images expire – once recipients open a picture message sent through Snapchat, they have no more than 10 seconds to view it. Users can set the timer for as little as one second.

Screenshots are also limited and one finger must stay in contact with the screen while viewing, which makes taking a screenshot even more difficult. Furthermore, even if you successfully capture the screen, the sender receives an alert that a screenshot was taken.

Moreover, recipients cannot save Snapchats. Senders can save their own photos, but unlike other camera apps such as Instagram, photos taken within the app are not saved automatically to a phone’s camera roll.

In its most recent update, Snapchat added the ability to draw on a photo with a simple colour palette. Users can also send Snapchats to groups of friends that they’ve set up in the app, as well as individuals. Snapchat can also locate friends on Facebook who use Snapchat, so that you can add them to the app’s contact list.

Snapchat can be fun but it can also be risky, even with built-in safeguards – consider the implications of the content that you’re sending out.

The app can be downloaded to any Android (recently out of beta) and Apple device.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.