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
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