Photo-Sharing App Trover Offers Tools To Distribute Images and Travel Tips

Trover, a funded photo-sharing startup co-founded by former Expedia CEO Rich Barton and Jason Karas, until recently has been mostly for photography buffs and do-it-yourself local culture enthusiasts, but the business end of it is making a humble beginning as Trover announced the release of three photo-sharing widgets for destination-oriented websites, hotels, blogs, and foodie sites.

The startup, with $2.5 million in funding from Concur, General Catalyst, Benchmark and Barton, is no Instagram, of course, but the community-oriented website and iPhone app offer hundreds of thousands of photos, taken in 175 countries, and the are all geo-tagged, with some offering stories and tips for locals and travelers.

You can view the gallery above to get a small sampling of Trover users' images.

The widget program grew out of Trover custom projects for fellow Seattle company Microsoft, specifically its Bing Travel, Windows and Windows Phone products and services.

The widgets being made available include the Trover Location Widget to highlight geo-targeted pics near a city, street, address or neighborhood; a Trover List Widget, meant for blogs to engage readers by depicting stories in a visual way, and a Trover Profile Widget, geared to publish photos, maps and tips "directly from the field," Trover states.

Karas says Trover is offering the widgets for free, and there is no attempt to monetize the business at this stage.

"It's all about getting exposure for our community and building our content base," Karas says.

His goal is to make Trover a photographic encyclopedia that travel and tourism businesses and people can use for travel planning.