Nokia Beta Labs

@Jonathan Greene: Thanks for the questions that we take as suggestions!

@Janne
Glad to know that you have battery optimzations on your agenda :) If we consider the current scenario, if users are connecting via their Packer data plan, the all time connection will cost them a lot of money just by quering the servers for update. And if the connection is Wifi, then needless to say, the battery would drained like water if it is active all the time!

Here is my suggestion on how an option could be provided to the users. An option between Push or Manual sync would be great. The user could then choose whether he wants the service to be push enabled (how the current setup is), or whether he wants the app to connect at a regular interval and check for updates (this way, even if a user chooses a 5 minutes interval or 15 minutes interval, the wifi connection time would be 5 times or 15 times less than the current setup!

Also, as has already been commented upon, we now have a conflict between Share on Ovi and Image Exchange. Although Image Exchange is a research project, it has a great potential, and is the way forward for Share on Ovi.
What i would like is for the current Image Exchange registration process to be altered a bit. Allow users to link up existing Nokia Accounts with their ImageExchange account. And those who do not have a Nokia Account, allow them to make a Nokia Account, right from their phone, based on their Phone Number as the Image Exchange account is made. This way, you can have your phone contacts (who have also registered), also be your Nokia Accounts contacts. Right now, Share on Ovi has contacts, but people do not maintain these many sets of contacts (On the phone, on email accounts, now even on share on ovi). If the Nokia Account is integrated with the phone contacts, then the user can share the pics with the contacts on the phone, with the same contacts via Share on Ovi online, and they can also be the address book for Mail on Ovi to be launched next year.

BTW, the UI effects on Image Exchange are really cool. Good work there.

You've re-invented flickr? A service that's so inconvenient Nokia users have only uploaded, commented on, tagged etc 10 million photos to it

http://flickr.com/cameras/nokia/

Those fancy photo rotation animations can be ported to the photo gallery or to the phone menu :)? or select it as the default viewer?

@ the team, will these suggestions and bugs people are highlighting result in another, tweaked open beta?

Nice app.
Upload after reboot only, no problem.
My only question is why not use my nokia account on this?

The offline application alone is a great replacement for the standard "gallery" appication. Good no-nonsense grid view, monthly view and nice zooming and rotating effects. Finally I get some transition effects on N82 :)

I don't like that some applications like this or My Nokia send SMS without asking me first. Also, the automatic account creation is a bit controversial, but it is an interesting experiment, I may begin to like it.

But all in all, this is one of the more interesting Beta Labs offerings since Audiobook Manager :) Keep up the good work!

Good job Friends,Please solve the E90 Communicator problem,am happy u know it has installation problem.

Simply can´t get a user name and password. The sms message can't be sent. How slould i proceed?

Barbaro el programa, que bueno seria poder aplicar esa rotacion de pantalla que tiene con transicion al menu del celular de mi N95!

I've found another small problem in that I can't type comments properly if I have Symbianguru CuteKeys installed. It seems to not be able to use the keys you have assigned as shortcuts.

I read the team's comment on Symbian-Guru's blog about restarting the device before the uploads start taking place!!

The downside is that betalabs is not getting the pre-requisite info correct. The maps issue with N85 and Maps 3, restarting the device for this one. I do not mind the beta bugs or issues, but atleast make the info clear and correct.

The good thing to be appreciated is that the team is scouring the net for the reports and posts and replying to the problems. This is a good medium of communication.

@Jukka
Before registering, the message displayed by the app mentions that the registration will take place by a SMS. You should have read the complete message.

@Alsiladka: Only photos that you choose are shared or published.

The initial setting up can take considerable amount of time especially if you have a lot of images. Images can appear as public ones only after they have been uploaded. When you take Nokia Image Exchange into use, all images are queued for uploading and thusly it may take some time before publishing happens.

@gerrymoth: It is unfortunate if you need to restart, but it is a practical a first aid if some things don't seem to work as they should. Our apologies.

I really like the fact that Nokia is trying out many different new technologies, and ways of doing things... I just need to see better integration in the final public offerings. There are too many options for doing the same thing, leaving one just dazed confused. Just don't do the same there here.

At the end of the testing and beta and several iterations of several applications, there should be one final product presented to the public. I haven't tried this, and don't think that I will, but it seems very much like ShoZu, which allows me to share my video, pics, text or whatever to most social networking sites, automatically or manually.

I long for the day when every program on my phone is integrated. If every program were to work from and pull information from my contacts, that would be great start. So that from my contacts list (or any program integrated with my contact) I could pull up Nokia maps of their address, and send email, texts, pictures etc. Any location based, and social networking services should be integfrated with my contacts as well, and let me know who is online, or where my friends are automatically at any given time, seamlessly, without having to open 4 separate programs.

We've had lifeblog, shareOnline 2, 3 & 4, and now we have Nokia Image Exchange... Shozu still seems like the best option. Whatever you come up with make sure that the final product takes the best of all of them and puts it all together in one seamless app.

I have two mobiles E71 and N95 8GB, I have installed Nokia Image Exchange on E71, Can I install Nokia Image Exchange in the Nokia N95 8GB withe same account??

An additional suggestion, what about being able to "Rotate" uploaded images while looking though them online.?.

neither can I, after it has sent a total of 18 messages and registration has failed each time.

New service, new beta!! Yayyy..
Although i was hoping Share Online for N85 would come first.
There are still some doubts left which have not been addressed by the video. If i share photos with my friends, will all my photos be shared or only the ones i choose?

I think the point of the Image Exchange is to try out much tighter coupling of the phone and the service than what is currently available with e.g. Flickr. Note that this service needs no configuration nor registration - it just works, and as such I could see some use for it among, well, the 99% of the human population which is not using Flickr at this moment ;-)

Whether this truly is better than the current Flickr or Ovi Share tools remains to be seen - but that's the point of Beta Labs, yes?

I made my pics public, but cannot see them on the web via my public!

Application is working well on my Nokia E71, but when I make images public, they are not appearing on the website. In fact none of my images are on the website. I can see the latest images from other people and comment on them okay.

****RESTART THE PHONE ONCE NOKIA IMAGEEXCHANGE IS INSTALLED FOR EVERYTHING TO WORK****

I've got my images uploading to the site now.

N85 -- also started uploading only after reboot

I've been charged £0.25 twice for 2 International SMS to register Nokia Image Exchange on my E71. Think you should make people aware of this before you get a flood of complaints?

Problem fixed, thanks guys

Tried it again. Installed the app and it opens fine, reboot and open the app and it doesn't fully open. The options apear onscreen but cant navigate between them, the background is just gray (no faint watermark image in the background) and no text apears above the left and right keys. The phone becomes slugish then the app crashes and closes down. This is on an N95-8GB

Installed it and removed straight away. It seems that even after you delete an image from your phone within the gallery app it is still available within the Image Exchange app. If I delete an image I want it deleting and not have to do it twice.

brilliant another app that doesn't work for your 'flagship' phone the n96! GRRRRR why oh why oh why did i not buy a iphone 3g!

@Lupa
Even i would like that only!

@Team
If you want to keep the registering simple and easy for the end user, atleast allow an option to link up the account with your Nokia Account via the website when a user logins for the first time via the web portal.
To those who dont use the webportal and keep themselves to the offline onphone use only, they wont be affected.

Also, please support NaviWheel!! That would make it an even killer app!

Also, why does this keep the wifi connection on all the times? Even after all my uploading has finished and i have closed the app, the wifi connection is still active. It will seriously drain the batteries guys! Please disconnect the wifi connection when not in use.

@Neil Brunnock: If you are still having problems, could you send your user name and phone number to imex-team@nokia.com and we'll have a look at what's going on and try to fix it.

@Giorgio: Giorgio, you are not forgotten, but I don't have E71 at my hands right now.

@gerrymoth: We are investigating the SMS-issues as we speak and try to see what all we can do to it.

@steves71: On deletions through Gallery this is an unfortunate situation, and is caused due Image Exchange using thumbnails for browsing. Gallery does not know about these thumbnails, and if you delete something through it, Image Exchange thumbnail remains even if the original is removed.

@steve71: I guess that your slowdowns might be caused by initial thumbnail creation and image uploads, especially if you have a lot of images. Our apologies.

@Alsiladka: Thank you for your suggestions! The reason for wifi connectivity (more so connectivity in general) is that it allows images on the device to be updated from the web service in the background. If people share images to you, these images are sent to your phone automatically for them to be ready the next time you open Image Exchange. But thanks, we try to see what we can do for battery optimizations.

Thanks for returning my email Janne, and thanks again for putting my feedback to the rest of the team, its highly appreciated.

Well done once again on this great powerful, underestimated app.!

Micky

@Janne Kaasalainen I dont think the slow down was due to it creating thumbnails, as it open ok before a reboot and then would hang and crash every time it was opened after a reboot. I have now found out what the problem is and something for you to investigate.

As I originally said I installed it and then removed it because of the issue I had with it not deleting images after they were deleted in the gallery. When I removed it the app was in offline mode. When I reinstalled it the app it would hang and crash every time after a reboot. I discovered that if I reinstall it, open the app, switch it to online mode, let it reauthorize the device then reboot it works fine. So there is an issue with it being reinstalled on a device if the app was offline when it was previously removed.

@steves71: Thanks! That's a detailed description of the issue and we start to look into it!

Great replacement to the standard Gallery but would be nice if you could also link to the image editor e.g. red-eye reduction. Perhaps a synchronised on-line editor would be useful so you can tweak your images on the PC once you have uploaded them.

Also, please make it easy to select which images are uploaded and upload via USB / PC-Suite would be really good.

The idea is wonderful. But what will make it irresistible is:

1. User selectable images for upload - which to upload and which not
2. Folders/sets/tags on the main site - for uploaded and shared images
3. I already saw porn images - when reporting image, it shall be immediately blocked (and the others from the same mobile) until reviewed
4. Clearer indicator for online activity - antenna, etc.
5. Multiple selection in thumbnails/preview - like the * key on S60
6. The application itself - as already stated - is way cool. Even better than the native galery

I registered on the Image Exchange Website using the sms user name and password they sent me, then changed my user name and password. Now I cannot sign in at all with either sets of user name/passwords, and when I try the "forgotten password" button, it says user name invalid, whichever one I use!

I'm trying to install this but my phone keeps telling me it's "not supported". I have an E71 and yes, I already tried setting the install "all" applications in the app manager. Any ideas? :/
Please help me...

Changed my username and password using the form that appeared after logging in to the website and now both my old login and new login no longer work. Congratulations!

the only real frustrating thing i've hit so far is the 'thumbnails aren't deleted when images deleted outside of the app' thing. couple that with the fact that i can't delete more than one image at a time (either on my N95, or on the website) and it's a frustrating process to try to cleanup any mistakes.

i didn't even think of it: i installed image exchange, my images were uploaded, i was happy. then i realized that 300 of my 340 images were low-res versions sent to my phone by Nokia Multimedia Transfer. so, i went to the website and app looking for a way to remove these low-res versions. no easy way from either perspective. i also looked for a way to upload my many many images to this site, but again it's a one-at-a-time deal. next, i fired up the app on my device again, now that NMT has transferred (moved) my images from my device (and purged my old low-res local copies) and of course i have the residual-thumbnails issue. here's my list of potential stress relievers:

1. tell us what to delete in order to reset the local app (in the end i uninstalled, removed E:\Imageexchange and E:\Images\*, then i reinstalled. this SEEMS to have done the trick, but i'm waiting for lots of empty squares to fill up in the app...)

2. the app/website should provide a large-scale purge option. at least a 'mark' option, or hey - even just allowing the 'C' key to be used in grid view would be 5x faster...

3. the website, along with large-scale removal of images, should support large scale uploading. it currently supports large scale downloading, which is nice... but i've got an enormous collection of images that i'd love to populate Image Exchange with; i just don't feel like fill up my phone with them in order to get them online. i've got 3GB of images taken solely with my N95, at least 50% of which i'd populate the public gallery with if only there were an easy method to do so.

power? geotagging? replacing the hardware Gallery button? all great stuff, but i think the above 3 tasks are far more important to me - i'm very happy with the idea of the service, the implementation has many strengths, not the least of which is the pleasant manner in which images are now presented and seamlessly transmitted over the air. the greatest weakness, imho, is that the interfaces don't scale well as users interact with larger sets of images.

-bit

@Chris

The full resolution images are indeed uploaded. The current implementation has a limitation so larger collections can not be downloaded via the web interface. A smaller collection is downloadable as a zip file, where the images are put in year - month folders. We are working on making the feature available no matter the collection size.

On behalf of the Nokia Image Exchange team,

Toni

i had 300+ images on my phone, installed image exchange, removed the images from my phone, [had issues, not related to THIS post], and now have a fresh install with no images in it.

how do i populate my nokia with the small versions of those images currently backed up on image exchange? under 'My Images' i only see the one test photo i took after reinstalling, and under 'Online Images' the only section that isn't empty is 'Latest' (and a random online image i've marked as 'Favourite' is under favourites).

am i mistaken for thinking that image exchange is intended to pull down small versions of all my images? i'm confused here, and not sure if i'm facing a bug or a misconception in my expectations.

-bit

@Joe: Thanks for the feedback! Image Exchange is an experimental solution from Nokia Research Center that relies heavily on data connections and requires an S60 v3.1 or v3.2 phone. Image exchange also experiments with using contacts information from users' phonebooks for automatic friend pairing. Share on OVI is Nokia's mainstream Image sharing service that doesn't rely on the assumptions mentioned above.

On behalf of Nokia Image Exchange team,

Elina

nice program, but would like to upload the pictures in original size, or at leat an option to choose the size.
Makes not much sense to have a 5 Megapixel phone, if all the pictures are reduced to low resolution. Then I better upload them with USB to my computer and then somewhere in internet.

Sharing pictures, the one you share a picture with, can just see the pic on his cellhone in this program, but thats all. Would be good if the person you share with can also use these pics in internet or on his cellphone.

Geotagging would be also nice ... so that pictures made with Location Tagger can be seen on a map.

This is a beautiful mobile application ... smooth and quick after the initial upload!

On the web side though it's still very beta feeling (I know it's in beta labs). Are there plans to integrate with Share on Ovi? Also how can I point directly to my photos or those of a another user? We don't seem to have user specific URLs ... It's impossible to "make friends."

this is cool, but can me make like an album view, where you can orgnize your pics in folders

@Baxeelelle: Thanks for your comments! Can you send us an e-mail to imex-team@nokia.com and we go from there?

@Joe: You are right, that is the current situation.

On behalf of Nokia Image Exchange team,

Elina

@Giorgio: Our apologies, but we haven't gotten an E71 on which we'd have run into these issues, so I'm sorry to that we don't know why exactly you've run into installation issues.

@Arjun Parsi: Multiple phone support is not implemented with Nokia Image Exchange. You are able to install to the phones, and the registration is likely to work, but I would expect some strange anomalies to occur.

@Claus & Mikey: If you've not yet solved your connectivity issues, please write to us at imex-team@nokia.com. We need a bit more info to track down what is happening.

@bitflung: Image Exchange scans "Images" directory on the device (usually "Data/Images") as well as that on the memory card. It creates a sub directory to directories where it finds images and creates the thumbnails there. Thus, it is possible but not really recommendable to play with those directories by hand to mess around with the application. For one, deleting thumbnail directories forces a thumbnail re-creation. Likewise, originals can be deleted and thumbnails left to be still able to do basic browsing but free up disk space. While this kind of toying is possible, anomalies may (and likely will) occur. We take a look at your other suggestions. Regarding the image downloads from the service - as of now Image Exchange does not pull small resolution thumbnails from the web unless the image was uploaded via the web interface. This creates a situation that you experienced. Your expectations are correct, however, and the "true" image sync is planned for future releases.

@Mikey: Yes, we are very much planning for new updates already.

@Chris Si: All your images (resolution depends on the camera) are uploaded to the service with their actual resolution. Otherwise it wouldn't be too much of a back-up. :) Also, if you make an image public, you can send links to it via the SMS or the web interface (to email). These images are usable by others.

@In general: We are aware that our web interface does not support well the case where one wants to upload a large set of images. We have also been looking at alternatives for a decently good and suitable solution. Currently it may be easier to transfer images to your phones and let it do the uploading for you in the background.

On behalf of Nokia Image Exchange team,

Janne Kaasalainen

Not bad, though as with others, I'd much prefer to see some of this integrated with the S60 Gallery application, as opposed to a standalone (and seemingly disconnected) application/service. Seems as though this might be using Scalado's technology, as well?

In any case, nice to see progress, now let's see some integration!

@Janne - Excellent interpretation skills! Looking forward to seeing more here ...soon!

Hi Developers &Fans!

Its a f.cking cool programm, I missed this from the Nokias...the fast image browsing rotating and zooming function. 5 star. But...I copied dosen of met-art pictures to my phone for my lonely minutes, and when I got back to my gf I deleted them from file manager, but their empty and black thumbnails stayed in the Image Exchange Programm, and I cannot delete them from there. I wanted to uninstall, and reinstall, but there was an error message, like unable to uninstall... I am searching the install folder on my phone memory, and memory card, but I cannot find it.
Does sy has a good solution?
Best wishes, Balint from Hungary,Budapest

I use an N82 phone.

I do understand that this is a research project, which is cool. So from what I read about this, for people who already use share online and other supported photo apps and sites, this is just a pretty gallery app. Am I correct to assume this? While it was fun to try out, I already use ovi and share for pictures and really dont feel a need for another site to post them on. I hope this doesnt sound harsh, I just wish it was going to replace share to allow for better intergration.

Is there any way to remove image exchange? because i cant on my n96! i read the message that it is not supported too late

You wrote: "All your images (resolution depends on the camera) are uploaded to the service with their actual resolution. Otherwise it wouldn’t be too much of a back-up".
But the single pictures appears in the service just in a reduced resolution ! So it isnt much of a backup!
And saving pictures as ZIP leads to error messsage (An error occurred. Please use browser back-button to return where you came from or continue to Nokia Image Exchange main page. Contact: imex-team@nokia.com) !

my nokia 3120C phone make continuous hang, when i listen radio. please help me.