Mokriya, a company that I am very close to recently released a photo app for iPad called Lens.ly.  With Lens.ly, you can download your Flickr albums for offline viewing – for example, you are on a plane or in a place where there is no Internet connection. It is one of those apps that you wish Flickr provided by default. They didn’t and that created an opportunity for Lens.ly.

Lens.ly is a brain-child of Joe Stump, who is well known in Silicon Valley. Most recently, Joe served as the CTO of SimpleGeo and now he is dedicating his time to Sprint.ly. I got a chance to talk to Joe about the creation of Lens.ly.

Here is the Q&A

RS: Joe, tell us in your own words what is lens.ly?

JS: Lens.ly is a way to sync photos from your favorite sharing sites (Flickr for now) to your iPad.

RS: What triggered the idea to build lens.ly?

JS: I don’t use iPhoto to curate my photos. Nor do any of my friends & family. They use iPhoto as a dumping ground and then curate on various sharing sites, such as Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I thought it was stupid that iPhoto didn’t offer over-the-air syncing and that it wouldn’t sync from sharing sites.

RS: Please take us through the story so far – from idea to launch?

I had the idea a while ago. Maybe 1.5 years ago. I went to Soft Facade to get it designed up, which I think turned out to be amazing. From there I contracted with an iOS developer who does a lot of code for me. Other things, such as Sprint.ly, ended up taking over most of my focus so I ended up talking to Sunil and his Mokriya team, whom I’ve been advising for a while now about taking it over. From there they took it the last mile and launched it. 🙂

RS: What next for lens.ly?

We want to add more sharing sites so you can import all of your photos from all of the sites you use. We also have some other ideas for how better to slice and dice your photos.

If you have an iPad and use Flickr, please checkout Lens.ly!