1 post tagged “picturebridge”
About five years ago, while I was working at Extensis, in Portland, I dreamed up a product idea - PictureBridge. (This is before "PictBridge" for those of you who have heard of that since then)
I tried to get it off the ground while doing my regular job and it went nowhere. When I left Extensis, I teamed up with a couple other guys and we started to put it together - starting with the Mac application. We got quite a bit of it done, but it was nowhere near where it needed to be, to be released. We needed a server solution. We needed a Windows version.
Today, I decided not to renew the web hosting plan for picturebridge.com. Kind of a big deal for me, thinking about how I wished I had gotten this thing going.
I still think PictureBridge could have been a great product. Here's the basic idea behind it...
PictureBridge is a desktop application - sort of like a lightweight iPhoto - but oriented more toward viewing photos - sort of like an RSS reader for photos. (By the way, this is years before most people had ever heard of RSS or podcasting, or photocasting - I think my timing would have been good for this product.)
When you plug your digital camera or mobile phone into your desktop computer, PictureBridge automatically copies all the photos from the device, makes smaller scaled previews and thumbnails of each one, organizes them into date/album folders on disk, and prompts you to give the batch an optional name - maybe you just got back from a party and want to put them all in an album with the party name. That's all you do on your end. You plug your device in, and you're done.
On the other end, PictureBridge users you are connected to will automatically, and in the background, receive these photos from you (thumbs/previews/originals/etc). A little notifier tells you when you've got new photos to view and can then take you into the PictureBridge application where you can walk through all the new photos, comment on them, print them out, etc.
My one sentence product explanation: I plug my camera into my computer, and the photos show up on my grandparent's computer automatically.
It's kind of like those digital photo frames where they go online and grab new photos periodically that someone else has uploaded.
The problem I have with sharing photos with my family is all the work involved in getting them off the device, onto my computer, organized into folders/albums, scaled down, and then no easy way to send them to other people in my family in such a way that they get them easily. Most of the people in my family that I'd want to share my pictures with are not high-tech users, so I wanted it to be completely automatic for them. Once they signed up and became connected to me in the system, there was nothing else they needed to do.
And that's the other half of the problem... the viewers. I don't have to go tell them there are new photos to look at on my website. They don't have to browse my website wondering if there are new photos or wondering where on the site they are. They can't easily print photos from a website at pre-defined standard frame sizes. And I could go on and on about how much easier PictureBridge would be on their end.
Even today, after many people have started to create photo sharing products, the exact idea - plug in your device, and done - has not really been done by anyone (that I know of). I still get photos from my Dad via email, since that is still the easiest way for him to share his photos with me. And my pictures? My family sees very few of my pictures for the same reason. I refuse to send them in email.
So, anyway, today kind of marks the end of the idea, by shutting down the website. Even though the website was never even completed, it's still a significant thought for me to shut it down. So long PictureBridge. I still think you were a good idea and could have been a product, had I been more resourceful, or maybe just a little bit crazy.
Here are a bunch of memories of the application and the website. I kinda liked the website. It would show a different photo each time the page loaded, which was a totally basic script but produced a fun result.
