Friday, May 9, 2008
Sharing Event Photos Just Got Easier With Shwup
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 09:21 AM
"You know the problem: it's a party, or a sports event, or a vacation. Some people took photos. Maybe someone brought a camcorder. One guy promises to email his shots around. Somebody else plans to post their pictures online. The third person swears he'll send everyone a DVD, as soon as he edits his video. And do you ever get to see any of those pictures? Yeah, we already know the answer. That's why we built shwup. We make it fall-off-your-chair easy for you to get everyone's photos and videos together online in a shared private album."
It sur3 s0unds lik3 Shwup pw0ns th3 pr0blem of event ph0t0 sharing! Sorry, I couldn't resist throwing in some l33t-speak there; Shwup is such a silly name, it sounds like a move in a FPS game. I guess all the cool names are taken. ;-) Silly name or not, Shwup looks like it might help solve the photo sharing problem from a different angle - on their Learn More page I read that after you invite people to your private album, they don't need to create an account or sign in to view it. Nice. And, better yet, if they want to contribute their own photos or videos to your album, they just need to reply to your email and attach their photos - Shwup takes care of the rest. Granted, there's still the problem of your aunt trying to attach 150 MB of JPEGs to an email, but Shwup can't take care of everything for you.
The biggest problem I personally face is integration - for years I'd switch from one photo sharing service to another, eventually settling on hosting the photos on my own server, that that grew tedious as well - so I locked in on Smugmug and have been quite happy with them...yet they don't have functionality like Shwup, and there's no easy way to integrate the two (where photos added by Shwup would flow back to your Smugmug album). Shwup does make it easy for you to import photos from Flickr though, so that's a start.
It sur3 s0unds lik3 Shwup pw0ns th3 pr0blem of event ph0t0 sharing! Sorry, I couldn't resist throwing in some l33t-speak there; Shwup is such a silly name, it sounds like a move in a FPS game. I guess all the cool names are taken. ;-) Silly name or not, Shwup looks like it might help solve the photo sharing problem from a different angle - on their Learn More page I read that after you invite people to your private album, they don't need to create an account or sign in to view it. Nice. And, better yet, if they want to contribute their own photos or videos to your album, they just need to reply to your email and attach their photos - Shwup takes care of the rest. Granted, there's still the problem of your aunt trying to attach 150 MB of JPEGs to an email, but Shwup can't take care of everything for you.
The biggest problem I personally face is integration - for years I'd switch from one photo sharing service to another, eventually settling on hosting the photos on my own server, that that grew tedious as well - so I locked in on Smugmug and have been quite happy with them...yet they don't have functionality like Shwup, and there's no easy way to integrate the two (where photos added by Shwup would flow back to your Smugmug album). Shwup does make it easy for you to import photos from Flickr though, so that's a start.
