I'm trying out the new Vizrea Snap media sharing service. Vizrea Snap debuted at this year's DEMO conference and hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves. If you own a Nokia camera phone, stop reading and go download the app now. It's free and you'll see what I mean almost immediately. If you don't own a Nokia phone, you should still try out Vizrea, but some of the cool features aren't as immediately apparent (yet).
So far there are a ton of things I really like about Vizrea and a few things I'd like to see improved. It's hard to specifically peg the service as doing one specific task, because it does a number of tasks well. Like any app I try, there are a few things I'd like to see improved which I will detail below as well. Below I break down the features I like in Vizrea and mention some of the areas where I'd like to see some improvement.
What I like about Vizrea Snap
Camera Phone Image Management: One thing Vizrea does better than other services is move photos from a camera phone to your desktop or the Web. You can either setup the phone service to auto-upload every photo and video to a default category on your Vizrea desktop or manage uploading on a per image basis. The camera phone app lets you title a photo and pick a collection for automatic image sorting. While other photo services like Flickr support emailing images to your account, the killer feature here is the sort. You can create a photo collection on the fly to keep images around a specific location or event grouped appropriately.
Contact/Friend Management: Vizrea provides an important level of granularity in contact management. I can specify individuals and groups with viewing privileges on a per photo or per collection basis. This is far superior to the traditional Friend or Not Friend approach. Even the Flickr Friend, Family or Public options are too basic if you only want to share images with a relevant group of people. Vizrea takes the approach that sharing photos can be on a per individual or per group basis, with unlimited group definitions.
Collection Management: Collection management remains one of the most complicated aspects of sharing photos with friends and family (and in some cases managing your own photos). Vizrea shines here as well. I can define a group of photos as a collection, share that collection with the people I want to see it through the Vizrea service, put the photo collection online and browse collections from any desktop or through the cell phone interface. One photo may be associated with many collections without needing multiple copies of each photo on your hard drive or a confusing assortment of folders. I can also browse any photos shared by my contacts on the phone, on my desktop or on the Web.
Media Management: Vizrea isn't limited to photos. In addition to JPEG images, Vizrea supports 3GP and MPEG4 video formats and the ARM audio codec common to many cell phones. The desktop app bundles required codecs, so you don't need to worry about playback once files are on your desktop.
Photo Browsing: Vizrea provides a phone interface for browsing photos stored on your home machine or in your contacts shared images. The desktop app sorts collections, provides image browsing for collections from contacts and offers limited photo editing.
Remote Updates: Everything in your Vizrea Snap universe, from the blog, to photo collections, to audio and video is updateable remotely. Depending on the features in your phone, you could maintain all Vizrea Snap features while going days or weeks without physically interfacing with your desktop.
Note: It's worth pointing out that Vizrea Snap isn't only meant for camera phones. Photos taken with any camera are shareable through the collection tree in Vizrea Snap. The cell phone stuff makes everything more portable.
What I don't like about Vizrea
Walled Garden Approach: While the combination of Vizrea desktop and cell phone apps is necessary for managing photos behind the scenes, I don't like being stuck publishing my photos to the Web in the Vizrea playground. I want to easily publish my photos to any blog service, the same way I can with Flickr. If you don't already have a blog or Web site, this might not matter, but I don't want to maintain a separate Web presence for every online service.
More Phone Support: Nokia makes some great phones, but I don't own one (disclosure: Vizrea loaned me one to test their service). I want to publish from any phone. I'm sure this one is only a matter of time and in fairness to Vizrea, Nokia was a smart starting point.
Can't Subscribe to Contacts: Current Vizrea Snap fuctionality limitsThere are some people who take really great photos. I subscribe to Flickr feeds because some people take really great photos. I want something similar in the Vizrea universe. Give me an "always download Paul's collections" option to reduce the wait time in browsing a friend's collections.
Smarter Phone Caching: While I love the concept of getting any photo from my home machine on a cell phone, I hate waiting. Vizrea Snap currently caches all downloaded images on the same schedule. I want the option to cache a specific collection longer than all others, but still maintain it as a collection, a digital wallet album so to speak.
No Mac Support: Mac users can view Web collections but there's no Mac version of Vizrea Snap at this point. While the Mac market is far smaller than the Windows market, this is the type of app Mac users might be likely to latch on to quickly if available.
Wrap-up
At the end of the day, I love where Vizrea Snap is headed. Managing media is still an imperfect world. We're slowly converging on a world where a cell phone provides camera functions, mp3 player functions and phone functions in one device. Vizrea Snap augments this convergence by providing a much needed media management component. Assuming they add more phones to the mix over the coming months and open up the walled garden just a little, Vizrea Snap will be an app everyone wants to download.
