NitroDesk: Solving a Photographer Problem
Digital photos. They are everywhere. You probably have three (or more) photo web locations, including things like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Windows Live, etc. All of these locations are designed to be sticky places for you to bring/store your photos and never leave. Sometimes, however, moving photos around is exactly what you'd like to do and it is a pain in the butt.
Goutham Sukumar, a former Microsoft developer, avid photographer, and super smart guy, has coded up an application designed to help. He calls it NitroDesk and he is putting it into beta.
The basics of this product are really simple. You have a pile of pictures on Flickr and you'd like to move an album or set over to Facebook. Simple. Set the product up and simply drag and drop the photos from one target to another. Or let's say you'd like to move photos from your desktop to multiple locations with one app/action. This is the application that can do that for you.
Additional features are:
- Browsing across the various sites from one application.
- Slide Shows of your various photos on each site.
- Searching sites like Flickr and Picasa for photos, browsing and adding the photographers to your favorites.
- Back up and restoring photos to/from a photo site.
The product currently works with these sites:
- Google (Picasa Web Albums)
- Flickr
- ShutterPoint
- SmugMug
- Windows Live Spaces
This is the public beta and there is certainly room to improve the UI a bit along with the fixing of various minor bugs, so be warned. The product never touches your original photos, doesn't send passwords off into space or store your personal data, etc, etc. This is just a damn useful application when dealing with the multitude of photo sharing/storage sites.
Goutham wants to expand this into a desktop application which can manage "web apps" in one place. All the web calendars, web emails, web this/web that. He is a sharp enough programmer that I'm excited about the possibilities.
For now, however, if you are a photographer with more than one location on the web, this tool is pretty close to must have. This application is a text book case of somebody taking a hard look at "Web 2.0" and solving a real problem. Go get the beta here.
Well done, Goutham.
Wow...huge implications! HUGE! Turn this app into a multi-website shopping cart! Imagine drag and drop functionality to purchase products from different compatible websites using only 1 shopping cart and 1 transaction! There would be some logistic figuring with shipping but it could be worked out. Amazing!
Posted by: Keith Glover | January 28, 2008 at 16:51
Great concept, great looking product. I want it.
Alas, Windows-only. So far.
Any plans to make it cross-platform?
Posted by: Doc Searls | January 29, 2008 at 13:36
Great tool. Thanks Goutham! Thanks Rick!
Posted by: Jaafer Haidar | January 30, 2008 at 11:41
Oooh thanks. I've been looking for something like this.
Posted by: David Dufresne | February 06, 2008 at 20:37