New in the world of

New in the world of Digital Photography (Demo 2004 Series - 4) The beat goes on in the world of Digital Photography. Two very nice (and one less nice) Photo Sharing products were launched at Demo this year. Quick notes on three of those.

PhotoSite from Homestead. This is a very nice simple online photo album. It’s customizable and has very attractive album pages. There is an annual charge, but it’s probably worth it.

Share-a-lot. This is a different approach. It’s a very easy, peer to peer sharing of photos with specific other people. This is a free service, so the question does arise how they make money. Visually it is less attractive then Photosite. Also you have to specifically indicate with who you would like to share.

Our Pictures is a custom client which delivers pictures peer to peer to your friends and family. The interesting thing about the team building it is that they were the people who developed AOL's "You Have Pictures" service. It shows: the user Interface is very nice. There’s also a tie-in with the photo retailer to order prints. I think they got it mostly right. They are providing a different transport to send pictures because for various reasons email isn't ideal. That's good. However I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater, because they don't even use email for notification - they have a separate application and notification method.

By the way, here's an article I came across that goes into more objective detail.