by Michelle Lentz

I discovered PixelPipe this morning via ReadWriteWeb, which is also where I acquired a beta invite (so, thanks RWW!). I love the idea of being able to post photos to multiple sites at once. I tend to use Flickr for all my photos, which makes it hard to share things via Facebook. I only have so much patience for uploading.

PixelPipe lets you pick as many places, or “pipes”, as you want and it will upload your photos to all of those locations. It’s rather speedy as well. I tried it with one photo and it quickly posted it to Twitpic, Flickr, Facebook, 4 Typepad blogs, and bub.blicio.us, which runs on WordPress. (I deleted it from most of those locations however.)

It uploads to your blogs and immediately creates a new post (XYZ via PixelPipe). My preference would be to upload the photo as a draft post to my blogs. I would also like to select which of my pipes the photo will go to – in other words, I might not want to upload the same photos to bub.blicio.us that I do to my Wine Blog.

However, I can certainly see, for now, setting up a couple different Pixelpipe accounts. One that uploads to Flickr and Facebook, for example, and another that uploads to my technology blogs.

Pixelpipe currently supports 33 different photo and video sharing sites. You can upload via a custom email address, directly through Pixelpipe, or use one of their desktop-based tools. These include Mac (including an iPhoto plug-in), Windows, and Linux tools. I downloaded the full Mac application and found it easy to use. In fact, if you’ve ever used the Flickr uploading tool, you’ll find this one remarkably familiar. An iPhone app and a Firefox plug-in are forthcoming.

PixelPipe is a free service that solves a problem most of us now have – how to share our photos with everyone we know.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

I was standing in my storage facility this weekend, trying to decide what I could trash. My husband found a box, and then another box, filled with old scrapbooks. This is why I love digital cameras – I’ve eliminated the need for physical scrapbooks that eventually gather dust in my storage facility.

Of course, there are now as many options for creating online digital albums as there are for creating physical ones. I probably have albums mouldering out in cyberspace now. There’s Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, PhotoBucket and too many more to count. The newest of the bunch, PicWing, has a twist or two that make it stand out in the crowd a bit.

PicWing, allows you to email or upload photos to your albums. Like any photo site, you can always access and share your albums via a web address. It’s the widgets that make the difference.

The first nifty widget works with your Chumby? Don’t have a Chumby? Neither do I, although at the moment I sort of want one. The Chumby is a little gadget that pulls down information from the Internet (sports, weather, etc) and now, it retrieves photos from your PicWing album. Of course, the Chumby requires a wireless network, which sort of eliminates me giving this little item to my Grandma, but I still like the idea.

The next nifty widget is a digital picture frame. I like the idea of this, but I feel the execution is a bit flawed. Right now, because it’s a beta frame, the PicWing team is putting these frames together by hand. Their frame, which costs $249, look identical to my own digital frame that I picked up one Christmas for $65.  Of course, my frame doesn’t receive over the air updates from PicWing, displaying all my online photo albums. It’s a great idea, but I’m a little wary about the price point considering other frames on the market.

Finally, you can also install a simple desktop widget – sort of a digital picture frame for the desktop. Since my Mom has a computer, I could conceivably install the widget on her machine. Whenever I uploaded new photos, they’d appear in her desktop widget.

While I’m not ready to jump Flickr-ship yet, I like the ideas that PicWing is implementing – daring to get away from the computer.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.