Thursday, September 13th, 2007

snapACT, Digital Photography Solutions Done Right: Part 2

As a follow up to our first blog posting introducing snapAct, we’d like to delve into a bit more detail about what we believe are the common sources of frustration in the digital photography world.

Who are we?

Our experiences as digital photography solution architects and providers go back a few years, so we believe that we have some great insight to the optimal workflow for digital camera users. Not only have we created digital photography software solutions as well as photo sharing websites in the past, but we have also been heavily involved in the digital photography community. A part of that involvement includes hearing what bothers people; whether it is missing features, poorly implemented features or lack of an intuitive interface, we’ve heard what people have had to say. We wholeheartedly agree!

snapACT’s goal is to create what you, a member of the digital photography community, needs. We don’t want to create solutions that you need to spend hours to learn how to use - we want to create solutions that help you achieve your digital photography needs with ease. Minimal hassle, minimal effort.

To do this, snapACT is always actively seeking input from people like you - people who see a need for better solutions. We can’t build something better without hearing about or observing what problems need to be solved, so please do feel free to share your thoughts by adding a comment to this posting.

What have we done so far?

We have taken our combined past experiences, along with the community feedback that we have received so far, to begin design and implementation effort on better digital photography solutions. The following steps are primary targets for improvement:

1. Adding photos from a camera to your computer
2. Tagging and adding your photos into albums
3. Sharing your photos

We are not about to lie and say that there aren’t any solutions out there that work for those 3 areas of functionality - but we do feel confident saying that there are no solutions currently on the market that cover of all of the above functional areas well. What’s more, few products provide elegant, intuitive and easy to use ways to accomplish steps 1, 2 and 3 in a seamless fashion.

Many software products provide an incredible amount of functionality at the expense of usability or ease of use; much of this functionality is unused by non-professional digital photographers. Furthermore, unless you are willing to invest a significant amount of time in learning how to use such products, you will likely experience frustration with digital photography in general. We want you to enjoy taking photos as well as sharing them, so it’s a good thing that snapACT has some usability experts on staff!

To address steps 1 and 2, we are going to introduce a new, easy-to-use digital photography management software solution to install on your Windows computer. When you plug your camera into your computer, this software will make it simple to add your camera’s pictures to your computer. You will then be led into organizing those photos into albums in addition to optionally tagging the photos.

For step 3, we are going to be releasing a new photo sharing social networking website which will seamlessly integrate with our software solution. It will use the albums and tags that you created in our software solution to share your memories online with friends and family with ease. With a minimal number of clicks, you can get photos from your camera to your organized online albums!

Significant progress has already been made on both efforts, and we intend to share more information on both in future postings.