Jason Pearce

Capturing photos and videos via a mobile phone is easy. Posting those files online from a mobile phone, however, is often tedious. In most cases you would email or MMS photos individually to Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

I was looking for a way to upload multiple images and videos from my mobile phone in a batch. I found two solutions for my Windows Mobile 6 device.

Yahoo! Go

Flickr is a Yahoo-owned property, so I thought I’d first see if I can find a tool they developed. I found and tested Yahoo! Go 2.0 (the 3.0 beta was not yet compatible with my Samsung SCH-i760).

Yahoo! Go 2.0 includes an interface for Flickr, among other things like your Yahoo! calendar, email, search, news, maps, and weather. It’s simple and works great on a mobile phone. It permits you to select multiple images to upload, but no more than six at a time. This was close to my solution, but it limited me to six photos at a time and worked only with Flickr.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Flickr Tour

The Flickr section of Yahoo! Go 2.0 features an easy “Upload photos” section.

Photos are available in groups of six (no videos). Here I select two of the six photos I wish to upload.

ShoZu

Where Yahoo! Go falls short, ShoZu excels — and then some. Not only does ShoZu support batch uploading of photos or videos to Flickr (just photos), YouTube (just video), and Facebook (just photos); it also interacts with Blogger, Box, Cellfish, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, LiveJournal, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and many more sites I’ve never heard of (see complete list).

With great flexibility, ShoZu also lets up upload to any email address or FTP account. And to take it one step further, ShoZu offers what it calls multiple destination uploading, which is a fancy way of saying it will automatically carbon copy (cc) up to 10 other sites (or FTP accounts, or email addresses, etc.) with the photos or videos you upload.

What this means is that when I use ShoZu to upload a batch of 20 photos to my Flickr account, I can ask it to also post those same 20 photos to my Facebook account, my Picassa Web Album, and store a copy in my FTP account for good measure. It’s a true one-to-many FTP-like solution that resides on my mobile. I don’t even know of a desktop client that does that.

ShoZu Tour

Here I have configured ShoZu to recognize three of my destination accounts: Flickr, YouTube, and a personal FTP site. My carbon copy sites are configured via their website and are not available via their mobile client.

Similar to Yahoo! Go, you may select multiple photos, but you have to first enable the ability to mark multiple images or videos.

Here I select two images to upload, but I may select all of them if I would like.

I may also select videos. Here I select two out of three videos I wish to upload to YouTube. Too bad they don’t offer a thumbnail to help me determine my selections.

I may even view the status of my uploads, which continue to run in the background.

For example, if I wanted to add a few more images to the upload queue, I may easily do so.

When ShoZu finished uploading, I found my photos on Flickr (primary site), Picasa (cc site), and Facebook (another cc site); and my videos on YouTube. My FTP site (also a cc site) had all of my photos and videos. Way cool!

ShoZu Shortcomings

In many regards, ShoZu exceeds my expectations. But now I’m hooked and I want more. Here are a few shortcomings or opportunities ShoZu’s developers should address.

1. Flickr Video: Flickr now supports both video and photos. ShoZu needs to catch up and permit users to also send Flickr videos their way.
2. 10 megabyte per file limitation: While photos won’t hit the 10 MB ceiling, videos most certainly may. With 1 GB memory cards common-place, they should bump this limit up to 150 MB or more.
3. Support more phones: While they already support many phones, my Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile 6 is unsupported. I took a guess and tried their software for another phone, which (mostly) worked.
4. Toggle CC Feature: Sometimes, I won’t want to send a photo or video to many locations. Provide your uses a way to toggle the carbon copy feature on or off. Better yet, let them multi-select the sites during each upload, much the same way they can multi-select which images they’ll upload in a batch.
5. Develop a desktop multi-file upload interface: Although ShoZu offers an upload tool for the desktop user, it uploads only one image at a time. If they developed an AJAX interface similar to Flickr and YouTube’s multi-file, browser-based upload tools, they would gain many more users.

This morning, residents in the Midwest were shaken awake by a 5.2-magnitude earthquake that originated out of West Salem, Illinois, approximately 187 miles from my home in Carmel, Indiana.

According to USA Today …

“The quake is believed to have involved the Wabash fault, a northern extension of the New Madrid fault about six miles north of Mount Carmel, Ill.,” said United States Geological Survey geophysicist Randy Baldwin. The last earthquake in the region to approach the severity of Friday’s temblor was a 5.0 magnitude quake that shook a nearby area in 2002, Baldwin said.

The Indiana Geological Survey writes, “On April 18th at 5:36AM EDT a 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Illinois. The epicenter was located approximately 5 miles northwest of Mt. Carmel, Illinois, 38 miles north-northwest of Evansville, Indiana, and 128 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri. The earthquake was felt throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and as far away as Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.”

The real data on the quake, however, can be found on the U.S. Geological Survey’s website. The cool thing is that the USGS has several map mash-ups that visually display data about the quake. They even have an online form that users can complete to report what they felt, as well as a map of their user-inputed experiences.

While the quake certainly woke and startled me, it was not severe enough to knock anything over or even set off car alarms.

Today I had the chance to ride at 80-miles-per-hour around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway track. It wasn’t in a race car or anything, but it was still rather exciting.

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