New product announcement : NitroDesk

NitroDesk · January 28, 2008

After months of preparation, NitroDesk Photographers edition BETA is finally on the web,

NitroDesk runs on Windows Vista/XP/Win2K3 (requires .net 3.0), and allows photographers to perform
- Multiple Uploads to different sites at once (you upload once, it appears in different sites)
- Backup your assets in any of your sites to your local hard disk
- restore from your backup to the same site or a different site
- Transfer (actually makes a copy) photos or entire albums from one site to another
- View, delete, edit your online albums from your desktop

SmugMug is of course supported, besides others such as

Flickr
PicasaWeb
Live Spaces (MSN)
ShutterPoint (good for bulk uploading)
FaceBook

Please feel free to download and try out our trial, move some photos around, do some multi-loads, backup your albums

If you like it , please spread the good word, if you dont, please let us know at support@nitrodesk.com

thanks!
-goutham

cmason · January 28, 2008

Gotta weblink?

NitroDesk · January 28, 2008

www.nitrodesk.com
http://www.nitrodesk.com/Default.aspx
you can get a BETA download, which has all the mentioned features..
thanks!
-g

cmason wrote:

Gotta weblink?

darryl · January 28, 2008

Very cool stuff, although a tad slow. I have a modest system here at work -- Win XP Pro v. 2002 SP 2, running on a Dell Optiplex GX620 w/ a 2.8GHz P4 and 1GB of RAM.

And for some reason certain images wouldn't load. Bug will be filed shortly.

What would *really* make this a powerful tool is if you:

1) get rotation working for SmugMug photos
2) allow bulk selecting thumbnails (shift-clicking, ctrl-clicking) for operations such as rotation or deletion
3) supported the new "hide photo" function in SmugMug

What do you expect to price this product at?

--Darryl

darryl · January 28, 2008

Also -- is there a non-Photographer's Edition of the product? I didn't see any mention of it on the site.

If not, I'd get rid of that bit in the title. It's just confusing to potential customers.

NitroDesk · January 28, 2008

Oh the title...
i think the current features are mainly devoted to solving photographers pain points... But the reason its called Photographers edition is because there is an expectation of having a corporate edition, which will do entirely different things on the same form factor. Currently under wraps (sorry)..

There is a little talked about version, which is the standard edition, which is expected to be the free version which can let the user browse, but crippled to not be able to do multi uploads, transfers etc (except for a trial period).

Pricing is still up in the air. At this time, we are hoping to hear from photographers about whether it is even valuable.. Maybe low 20's - any feedback welcome on this front.

Unfortunately, making it completely free would doom the entire project :-), since this product needs serious engineering to take it to the next level.

Darryl, i see you have taken it for a spin, and would be glad to address all the issues you pointed out. Might take the help of the SmugMug API hackers for some of it (rotations and videos etc).

thanks!
-nitro

darryl wrote:

Also -- is there a non-Photographer's Edition of the product? I didn't see any mention of it on the site.

If not, I'd get rid of that bit in the title. It's just confusing to potential customers.

darryl · January 29, 2008

Hi Nitro:

I would gladly pay in the low $20s for a product if it had the following features:

- Delete Photo
- Hide Photo
- Rotate Photo

(Individually or with a bulk selection.)

- Caption Photo
- Crop Photo
- Sort/rearrange photos

Now rotate, crop, and hide are still only available in the beta API, so don't worry about those.

I've been whining about SmugMug lacking something like this for a while. While SmugMug has amazing backend architecture, excellent web presentation for your photos, and stellar support, their photo management tools are ... suck.

Through their open API, as well as internal development, they've created a huge array of *upload* options, on pretty much every platform you'd want, and integrated into everything from Adobe Lightroom and Bridge to Apple iPhoto and Aperture.

But once the photos are up there, you're stuck with 90s-era drop-down menus, and clunky JavaScript multi-select to take care of any of the functions above.

There are also a number of bulk download tools as well, but they're mainly dedicated to that one purpose.

Ability to upload to multiple sites and transfer between them is an interesting idea. But I don't know if the demand for such a tool is big enough.

Much like SmugMug, Flickr has plenty of upload options, and Picasa is one of my favorite local photo management tools ever, and it's hard to compete with free.

I imagine Facebook, Shutterpoint, and Windows Live Spaces already have upload tools too and don't know whether their APIs even support the kind of photo management that SmugMug offers developers.

But I do know that SmugMug knows that this is a problem area for them. I also know that Nikolai has been able to I guess make a decent side-business selling Star*Explorer (somebody must be paying, right?), which does uploads, downloads and gallery setting management, but none of the photo management stuff I mention.

This is a huge hole that needs to be filled. I think this became clear when I found out about Phanfare. They have a desktop client for Windows (and Mac, hopefully someday) that handles all the functions I've mentioned above. They recently went to a free but private model for sharing photos, but that doesn't change the fact that their photo management tool is a wonderous thing. (Also, background uploading is another very very cool feature.)

I highly recommend signing up for a free account and then stealing all of their good ideas and implementing them to work with SmugMug. :-}

tcsac · January 29, 2008

I've actually already hinted to the chief geek I'd like to see basically "picasa for smugmug". Same functionality/integration. I love picasa, I hate what google has done with the online side of things.

Enough of that, one note on this actual application: any thoughts on having an option to keep a local cache of photo's? On slower connections, having to download every photo everytime I start up the app is painful at best.

darryl · January 29, 2008

Mmm, yes, local caching would be good. Phanfare does this.

Picasa does rock, but their web presentation of your albums is pretty spare on frills.

Also annoying -- they do not have an official API for the Picasa application, so any of the "upload" tools for sites like SmugMug or Flickr are kind of hacks.

The SmugMug Picasa plug-in does rock pretty hard though, and they were going to bring the back-end for it in-house, as I recall, to alleviate some of the bandwidth/processing issues that the original author was running into on his webhost (right?)

--Darryl

devbobo · January 29, 2008

darryl wrote:

The SmugMug Picasa plug-in does rock pretty hard though, and they were going to bring the back-end for it in-house, as I recall, to alleviate some of the bandwidth/processing issues that the original author was running into on his webhost (right?)

this actually went live today.

NitroDesk · February 1, 2008

New announcement - Picasa Connection!
We are listening...
Today morning we enabled picasa integraton for NitroDesk.
The integration does the following:
When you click the "NitroDesk MultiLoad" button (which gets put in there when you install NitroDesk, and it finds a Picasa installation), NitroDesk, if running will catch the images and pops up the multi-load window.
Here you can select one or more destinations - SmugMug, Flickr, PicasaWeb etc..
For each account, you can also specify whether to create a new albumor use an existing one.
THen just click the Begin Upload button.
Nitrodesk will, in the background, upload all the selected pictures to the selected albums.

If you do happen to try this out, please drop us a note... :-)
If something breaks, please let us know...

devbobo wrote:

this actually went live today.

NitroDesk · February 1, 2008

Caching :-)
Very good observation - NitroDesk actually caches all images (currently we have a threshold of 10Mb beyond which we will trim the cache on startup) locally. This means you dont have to refetch images from the sites every time you are browsing...

Even if you refresh the actual albums (say after you upload a new album), the images in the cache are reused to display to you. However, if you decide to transfer images between services, we will refetch the images for transfer purposes - currently.

Do give the tool a whirl and let us know how it goes...
thanks
-g

tcsac wrote:

I've actually already hinted to the chief geek I'd like to see basically "picasa for smugmug". Same functionality/integration. I love picasa, I hate what google has done with the online side of things.

Enough of that, one note on this actual application: any thoughts on having an option to keep a local cache of photo's? On slower connections, having to download every photo everytime I start up the app is painful at best.

New product announcement : NitroDesk

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