Nokia Photos back with a vengence: 1.5 released

I decided it was about time to give Nokia Photos another try. I had played with it some before and know there is potential, but it behaved weirdly and was a bit awkward to use. Mostly, I am in the process of making sure all my pictures are backed up as I dismantle computers and prepare to move. Thanks to the Guru, I knew that Nokia Photos could be used to mass-upload pictures to OviShare, but had been unsuccessful in the past. It was time for another try.

Make sure you are running 1.2.50 or later. For some reason, the Nseries Suite installer installed an older version and would not recognize an update was available. 1.2.50 is the first version where the connection to the Ovi online account worked properly and the setup worked as advertised.

As a bonus, three days ago, Nokia Betalabs released a new version of Nokia Photos, 1.5, which promises to work with more phones, better support interfacing with plain ole digital cameras, and work even better with Share on Ovi. The Nseries Update Manager did not know about the new version, so I had to go and download the 50MB file manually. It warned about needing .NET framework 3.0, which I had, but I took the opportunity to visit Windows Update and make sure I had the most recent patches, which I didn't, so I installed them while downloading Nokia Photos 1.5.200



The Good

Something else that has made this new application a success is the total ease with which it works. So long as it is running, and my n82 is nearby, they will automatically sync up, so my photos and videos are always backed up. This is made possible by the ultra-cheap bluetooth dongle I bought with my new PC at CompUSA, and configuring Photos to sync on startup, as well as the Nseries PC Suite, which keeps my photos and phone backed up in case of an emergency.

The annoying

• tags
• 50 photo limit
• Ovi client on the phone
• backups

Tags: the tags are very useful but it is difficult to search for them. Say you have meticulously tagged your photos and you want to search through your photos for your friends. It is unintuitive, but the way to do this is to go to the search bar and type in

owner:username tag:friends

where username is your login id. I use ktneely, and this works really well, but an online photo-sharing site should not need such arcane search strings to search through your own photos. What's more, it does not appear to take multiple tag entries. Well, it does, but it treats them as an or, rather than an and. So if you search for friends and florida, the search results will include all the pictures of friends as well as all the pictures tagged florida, even if the latter is simply a picture of a building tagged 'florida' but certainly not 'friends.

One giant improvement with 1.5 is that tags on a photo are included by default. So, if you have mass tagged and then plan to mass upload, your tags will be included. However, a step backwards is that there is an extra click to tag a photo. Instead of just typing, you need to click the plus sign to add a tag to the selected photos.

50 Photo Upload Limit: I would say this isn't a huge deal except when you are first importing your photos into Ovi, but my parents just got back from Europe, and they took 1800 pictures with their digital camera! Yes, they are crazy, but I know they're not the only ones, so this limit can get pretty annoying, pretty fast. You can get around it by uploading 50, and then starting an additional 50 before the first one even finishes. At least this way, you do not have to sit through each group of 50, instead starting as many sessions as you need and then walking away. Still, this limit is silly.

Ovi client on the phone: To really interface with OviShare, you need the ShareOnline 3.0 application installed on your phone. This comes standard with most new Nokia mobiles, including my N82, but older phones like my N75 are not included, which is a shame because that device takes great outdoor pictures. Also, you have to make sure to specify the default channel into which you want the pictures uploaded. On my first few tries, my pictures all landed in my friend's birthday channel because I had not specified. The default should be the username.mymedia channel because that is the general repository for one's media on Ovi.

Backups: I went to do a backup of the photo database before I upgraded, but it told me it would consume 57GB of space.

And the thing is, my entire hard drive only has 45GB of data on it, and that is everything. My photos are maybe 2GB, so I am not sure where this is coming from. This is an important feature to migrate your photos with all their tags to a new computer, so I hope it gets better.


What I would like to see
As it now works pretty well with Nokia's OviShare service, I would like to see better integration with that same service, something almost akin to "syncing" of my photos on my PC with the ones on Ovi. I would like to be able to create an album within Nokia Photos, and then have it propagate to my Ovi account.

The reason for this wish is that I would like my tags and photos to propagate to all places. If I upload using ShareOnline, and then tag the pic on the website, and later sync that picture with Nokia Photos on my PC, the tag is not there, it is only online. The only way to really keep it all in sync is to get the photos from the device into Nokia Photos, and then to use that to upload to Ovi, making sure you check "include tags". There is a map, which you should see from the images, and although I had some geotagged images and many to which I had attributed a location tag, they did not appear on the map, which is a bit disappointing. This means that the "location tag" is really just another tag and I will have to wait until I get my N82 back from Nokia warranty repair to give this a real test.