Pros & Cons
-
- Create a photo album on your PC and Sharpcast automatically builds an identical album on the Web—and vice versa.
- You can even synchronize across multiple PCs and handhelds.
-
- Not quite as powerful as competitor Phanfare.
- Lacks Phanfare's ability to handle video and music files.
The interface is nearly perfect. With Sharpcast Photos, now in its second beta release, you can organize, edit, back up, and—most important—share your digital pics in a way that's so intuitive, you'll wonder why someone hasn't done it quite like this before. And it's free. At least for the moment. Until the end of January 2007, you can set up an account with 5GB of storage space without paying a penny.
The question has always been: Where's the best place to put a photo management app—on the desktop or on the Web? In one sense, the desktop is the better choice. If you stay on the desktop, it's easier to manipulate photos (if you think waiting for a photo to redraw locally is bad, just imagine what it's like across a bandwidth-challenged Internet connection). And you needn't worry about getting photos onto a server. Just uploading to the Web can be tedious—even if you don't lose network access. On the other hand, the Web is the best place to share your photos with others, and for most people, sharing is the primary aim.
As a consequence, the market is littered with both desktop-based apps (like Picasa and ACDSee) and Web-based apps (like SmugMug and Streamload), and many people end up using two applications—one from each camp. Yes, some desktop apps include a means of uploading to the Web. But, in most cases, this is merely an add-on, not an integral part of the app, and the uploading process remains tedious.
Sharpcast solves this problem by providing a desktop application that seamlessly synchronizes with the Web—in much the same way the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook synchronizes with the app's Internet service, Outlook Web Access. When you add a photo to the Sharpcast desktop client, it automatically shows up on your personal Sharpcast Web site. And if you edit that photo on the desktop, the changes show up on the Web, too.
This sort of thing has been done before, most notably by
Getting Started
The key to the whole platform is that it's so intuitive. Once you sign up for an account and download the desktop app, you can set up a photo album simply by dragging and dropping pics from elsewhere on your hard drive. This not only arranges the album on your PC, it sets up an identical album on the Web, moving backup copies of your pics to Sharpcast servers. As you drag and drop, all images are uploaded to the Net—in the background, without additional hassle.
From the desktop client, you can quickly and easily edit your album, removing photos, adding new ones, editing individual images, adding captions and comments, and more. And each change you make is automatically made on your personal Sharpcast Web page, which you can instantly share with friends and family.
Those familiar will Phanfare will know that it works much the same way, but Sharpcast makes the process even simpler. The interface is so well designed that how to do most anything is immediately obvious. The app includes classic Windows pull-down menus, but you can perform most tasks from wonderfully accessible tools built right into the face of the app. Want to view a slideshow? Click the Slideshow button. Want to edit a photo? Hit the Edit tab. Want to add comments? You get the idea.
With Phanfare, by contrast, things are just a little more complicated. You can view a slideshow, for instance, but you can't do it from the desktop client. You have to be on the Web. You can't edit photos without opening a separate window.
Sharpcast's editing tools aren't anywhere near as extensive as those available with a high-end desktop client like ACDSee, but you'll find all the tools you'd expect from a mainstream photo app. You can rotate, crop, fix red-eye, add black and white effects, adjust contrast and brightness levels, and more. Sharpcast's tools do the job. The red-eye tool typically fixes red-eye. You can adjust brightness with ease. And so on.
Again, any edits automatically show up on your Web albums, which you can share with others. You can share with the world at large or limit access to individual friends and family members. The desktop client includes a Contacts database, where you can store names and e-mail addresses. To share an album, you simply select the intended recipients' names from the Contacts database and Sharpcast will send them an e-mail, alerting them to the new pics. And, no, they needn't be Sharpcast users to view your albums.
What's more, if you visit your own Sharpcast Web site (you'll have to log on), you'll find a scaled-down set for tools for editing photos, organizing your albums, and managing contacts. Naturally, any changes you make on the Web will automatically show up on your desktop. With the new iPhoto Uploader, you upload pictures from Apple's iPhoto app to your Web site—even if you don't have access to your Sharpcast desktop client.
While you'd normally want to do the heavy lifting locally, it's great to be able to do at least a little editing without access to your primary PC. It's ideal if you're traveling and want to get pics up, do a little minor retouching, and share them right away—before you head for home.
And Sharpcast's seamless synchronization doesn't just work between your PC and the Web. You can also synchronize across multiple PCs or, optionally, across cell phones and PDAs. Since all your pictures are backed up to the company's servers, anytime you set up a Sharpcast client on a new machine, you can instantly pull in your existing albums.—
But Is It the Best?
At the moment, Phanfare is more powerful than Sharpcast. Most notably, it handles video—and handles it very well. But its basic interface isn't nearly as smooth, and it will cost you $54 a year. Sharpcast won't be completely free for long, but the company says it will always offer some sort of free version, and that the free version will provide a way for the average person to store an entire photo collection, at least in compressed format. Basically, if you're an experienced photo sharer and you need a wider range of tools, go with Phanfare. If you're a new user who just needs an easy way to organize, edit, and share you pics, go with Sharpcast.
I like the Sharpcast Photos interface so much, I'm tempted to give the app an Editors' Choice. But considering that Sharpcast hasn't officially "shipped" (it's still a beta) and that I don't know how much it'll cost or what the video and music offerings will be, I thought it best to wait on a final decision. Stay tuned.
More Photo Management reviews:
Final Thoughts
Sharpcast Photos Beta 2
Sharpcast is ideal for the even the greenest computer users—a near perfect way of organizing, editing, and sharing photos.