NitroDesk: A New Way to Manage Photos, Video

It has never been easier to take photographs and video but managing everything can be a huge challenge given there a variety of places on the Web where your photos and videos are stored and featured.

NitroDesk aims to solve this problem with the launch of software that makes it easy to upload your photos and videos from your desktop to multiple photo sharing sites at the same time. It also allows you to transfer photos from one site to another, as well as synchronize photos from your desktop with your online albums.

Among the sites supported by NitroDesk include PlanetEye, SmugMug, Zenfolio, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Shutterpoint, Windows Live Spaces, Vimeo and YouTube. The software (Windows only) can be downloaded here; people will want to purchase a license can get $10 off $29.99 retail price by using MARKEVANS in the coupon area.

NitroDesk is the self-funded creation of Goutham Sukumar, who started it as a side project. I had a chance recently to do a Q&A with Goutham about NitroDesk and why he created it. (Click the “more” button at the bottom for the second part of the Q&A)

What’s the genesis of NitroDesk? What problem did you see and why did you decide to create NitroDesk to solve it?

I have been taking pictures for a long time. Naturally, sharing photos online is something I always do. However, different photo sharing sites are slanted towards different goals: PlanetEye is for travelers to highlight the places they have visited, Flickr has a good community slant to it, SmugMug and Zenfolio are typically used by professionals to host their portfolios and PicasaWeb is simply great for sharing with family and friends.

When I started using more than one site, I realized the need to use different tools to upload the same pictures to multiple places. I also quickly lost track of what I had uploaded and where. Having come from an EAI and thick-client world, I came to realize too, that the same principles we use for integrating legacy backend systems could be leveraged to make all photo sharing (and similar) services work/play well with one another. Photo site integration is just one example which I decided to tackle right away.

Can you give me an overview of NitroDesk’s features? What does it do, and how do you expect people to use it?

I think i can best answer that by talking about how I use NitroDesk:

Multi-Loading
Every time I take pictures at an event or a trip, I put them on Picasa and do the necessary corrections to the images (back-lighting, auto leveling etc.) Once I’m done, I select the pictures that are worth sharing, and upload them through NitroDesk to one or more sites simultaneously (SmugMug, Picasa primarily, and now PlanetEye). Waiting around for uploads to finish is something I did not like to do, so NitroDesk has a mechanism where the images are uploaded in the background without making the user wait. This was especially useful when loading the hundreds of MBs of HD video to SmugMug for showing in the challenges page on our Web site.

Management:
If you had 100 photos in an album, 20 of them being taken at Niagara Falls and you wanted to set their titles to “Niagara Photos”, you will quickly see some pain points. I use NitroDesk to multi-select these photos and set the title/keywords once and apply them in bulk. Same thing with privacy settings, categories, etc. This is not unique, Flickr provides you with some bulk-editing functionality, but NitroDesk extends it to all other sites that allow individual image property editing. You will also notice that each site has its own unique set of properties that you can edit. NitroDesk handles that too. Depending on the site you work with, some functionality may be unsupported, but we take a best-effort approach.

Transferring:
Once in a while, I feel that some of the photos I have on my Picasa or SmugMug albums are probably going to fetch me a fortune on ShutterPoint (it has never come true but there’s nothing wrong in dreaming). Or maybe a friend on Facebook asked me to share pictures from an event, which I had originally uploaded to Picasa. For this, I drag and drop the pictures from the source album to the destination (say PicasaWeb to ShutterPoint/Facebook).

Technorati Tags: NitroDesk, Photography, PlanetEye

Synchronization:
This is for people who want to keep their online photos synchronized with folders on their desktop. To perform synchronization, you need to first specify a few things:
- The album to synchronize (or an entire site)
- The folder on your computer to sync to
- The schedule for the synchronization (manual, every N hours, every day at a specific time)
Once you set it up, the following happen:
- If you drop a photo into the folder, it will be transmitted to the site/album linked to it
- If you upload a photo into an online album from elsewhere (say you are travelling), the new photo will be copied over to the specified folder
- If you delete a photo from an online album, it will be moved away from the folder on the synchronized PC (not deleted..)
- BUT, if you delete a photo from the folder, it will be refetched (this is because sync never deletes media from the online site automatically)
- All of the above rules apply to albums/travel packs too.
Thus, you can always be guaranteed that what you have online is reflected on your home PC (or multiple PCs)
One of our customers actually plans to use this to keep two online albums with thousands of photos in sync using some crazy wiring

How is NitroDesk different from what is available currently, and how people are handling, editing and managing photos online?

There are lots of uploaders out there. Most of them are created due to a developer being passionate about his own personal photo sharing needs. But NitroDesk is probably the first commercially supported product which does multi-loading (loading to different sites). Seamless drag and drop inter-site transfer is another pain point, around for years that NitroDesk addresses. Once you have uploaded your photos online, the browser, and the UI provided by the site is probably the only option users typically have. While the specific scenarios might be a little different, NitroDesk aspires to be for your online albums what LightRoom is to your local photos.

What’s the plan to get NitroDesk into the hands of as many people as possible?

We did a beta in February, and have had over 300 downloads, and had some great feedback (some of which is reflected in features such as multi-selected updates, Video uploads and management on YouTube and Vimeo, synchronization etc.) Given that NitroDesk is a self-funded effort, I don’t think you are going to see NitroDesk ads at the SuperBowl ever. Marketing avenues are still being explored, but one of the possibilities is to have the sites themselves promote NitroDesk, which is good for the sites (more photos being uploaded per minute) and good for their users. There is always free licenses and coupons for bloggers who talk about it.

What’s the road map in terms of new features?

There are a few ideas being toyed with. Faster uploads and better visualization are always at the forefront. However, having a presence on the desktop means we can innovate a lot on the experience. This might mean more ways to get your photos from disk to Web (Windows Explorer context menu/ system tray icon, a web-bin), better sharing options (to your Facebook buddies/ Gmail contacts/Outlook contacts), more straightforward site-to-site synchronization, and maybe even face recognition – driven cataloging. But, of course, almost everything driven by customer feedback and satisfaction. There are also several other integration scenarios possible that have nothing to do with Photos but everything to do with online service integration.