Friday, September 12, 2008

Western road trip facebook album/FolderShare

I've posted the best pictures of our road trip in a facebook album (you don't need to be on facebook to view it from this link). I figured this would reach a wider audience faster - I haven't yet decided whether or not I'm going to duplicate this on the higher quality Picasa. If anyone has thoughts on the pros and cons of various photo sharing methods I'd be curious to hear them. My thought on the subject is that it would be really cool if there was an open API for photo sharing that allowed me to tag and caption all of my photos in iPhoto or Windows Live Photo Gallery and then export it to any number of photo sharing sites. Good luck to whoever tries to implement that...

On a related note, the product I am working on, Windows Live FolderShare, is a great solution for peer-to-peer photo sharing, a problem that has nagged several trips I've been on recently. Until now, I haven't had a good method for quickly pooling the photos of an entire group in full quality. Most online publishing/sharing tools like Picasa and SkyDrive have poor support for Macs and work sketchily at best on PCs for large-scale sharing. FolderShare cuts out the middle man; the Windows Live servers merely coordinate synchronization between multiple computers, while files are transferred using peer-to-peer methods. I can synchronize my pictures between any of my computers, and invite friends to subscribe to my folders. For example, I could just share my Pictures folder with friends and give them read-only access, or I could create a group share folder that we could all edit. There's even a Mac client, so Alex Peters can participate. Synchronization happens instantly as long as both computers are online, and you don't have to worry about timing out the download because it will resume whenever both computers are online again.

2 comments:

  1. the first priority in any implementation should be ease of use for Alex Peters.

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  2. Ha!
    Actually, I've upgraded. Now all photosharing with me must be matrix compatible. That is, you're going to need a photosharing terminal that you can plug into the back of my head.

    Nice shout out.
    p.s. you of all people know I have a gmail account, despite your e-mails to my outdated and old princeton.edu account.

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