First impressions

Review for Nokia Image Exchange

27-01-2009 17:49

To be honest I completely failed to see the point of this service when I first read about it, so I ignored it for a while. Later I decided to take a peek, and after seeing the promotional video featuring a geeky guy with a cool accent I proceeded to install the application.

The installation went smoothly and everything worked from the start, so I have nothing to complain about there.

The gallery browsing is incredibly fast and the background uploading does not seem to affect the phones general performance. After zooming around in my gallery and the latest images I started to consider what we actually have here. Basically it's fast image browser with automatic online backup.

The added publishing possibilities are not that useful in my opinion, since the service currently lacks a proper community behind it.

This application has great potential if some key features are incorporated.
A couple of things would make this application very usable for me:
- publish images to ovi channels
- zoom images
- rotate image source (so that it will appear the correct way on the web)
- integration with the ovi login.

This service in itself could be a part of ovi, and the make public part could be changed to publish in channel. That way share online and this application could work side-by-side.

Anyway only 3/5 stars for now, since the sharing of images on this service is not as useful as that on ovi, and therefore not really needed.

With the features I suggested, this would be a 5 star service, atleast for me.

Comments

Submitted by jkaasala on 28-01-2009 14:23.

Thank you for the feedback! We'll take a look into many things you've listed above in the future. For zoom images:

Images can be zoomed with # and * buttons, or volume keys. Note: volume keys do not work if music player is open. We are trying to improve the zooming behaviour though.

Submitted by mece on 29-01-2009 10:38.

Yeah I noticed the zooming feature when playing with the app. It's very nice and fast :
Actually if this would use ovi login, you could use the "share..." to publish the image to an ovi share channel. That would be pretty sweet.
I'm liking this app more and more.

Submitted by vsteudle on 17-02-2009 14:39.

Hi,

I'd like to add to the previous comments - this is something that would be good to integrate with the existing offerings.

I am missing the "established features" like publishing to limited groups (restricted "channels") or geotag processing (geo searching in phone, map view in phone and on web).

Where I see some opportunity is the "looks" of the webservice - Ovi lacks behind there with its esthetics for the more photo-quality-interested (just have a look e.g. at Shutterfly or other similar service). The Image Exchange web interface looks clean and image-centric (which I like).

So, to recapture, here are some suggestions:

Web service:

- Geo data processing (map view, geo search)
- Restricted albums (visible only to friends)

Phone application:

- Geo data processing (map view, geo search)
- Selective publishing (some pics, to a certain recipient group/channel)
- Selective upload (only with WLAN, only at night, only with charger plugged in etc)

Note also that some phones (e.g. E71) have dropped all image editing from the built-in gallery application, therefore a scale/rotate/crop/colour/contrast module would be needed there.

Regards,
Ville