Shwup Your Photos

by Michelle Lentz

Shwup is yet another online photo-sharing tool. Shwup, however, is sort of the anti-Flickr. I doubt they’re shooting for that moniker, of course. But they do consider privacy before they consider sharing, which is pretty cool.

Shwup lets you upload your photos and then set the privacy levels for each album. In fact, viewing albums on Shwup is strictly invitation-only, sort of a velvet rope for your latest photo album. This way you can have different invitees to different albums.

For instance, you can upload a few work-related albums and invite your co-workers. But your co-workers won’t be able to see the photos from your wild night out on the town without an invite, and vice versa. Shwup calls this some-to-some sharing.

Each email invite comes with a personalized link. The invitee need not sign up for Shwup to view the album, but they need to follow their specific link. You can also invite your friends to add their own media to the album. All they need to do, if you’ve set up the permissions, is reply to their invite email with the photos attached.

Shwup can read all the major image formats, including JPG, BMP, GIF, and PNG as well as videos in MPG, MPEG, WMV, MOV, AVI, QT, 3GP and MP4. Videos take a little time to display because Shwup converts them to FLV files first. Shwup also reads ZIP files, which makes it easier to email attached photos. During the beta period at least, you can upload as many photos and videos as you want. The multi-file uploader accepts photos of any dimension. When you add photos in the file-by-file uploader or by e-mail, they can be a maximum dimension of 3000×3000. Each file can be a max of 100MB. Shwup can also import from Flickr, Facebook, or a specific URL.

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