Nokia Album

A few weeks ago a nice chap at Nokia pointed me to v2.0 of Nokia Album, which works on the 6630. This evening another Nokia-ite (is that the correct term?) thoughtfully got in touch to offer help, so I thought it about time that I blogged!

The above version works, and is suitably improved over the stock Gallery and Camera. The Album installer provides two apps, “AlbumCam” and “Album”, which add time- and location-based interaction with your media. The camera extension uses cell information to automatically place your pictures into locations named by you — e.g. right now the readout on my 6630 shows “Home”. You can then browse by location in the Album, which I suspect can completely replace the Gallery for most people.

You also get a load of extra view options for free, (from List to 5×5 grid), extensive search abilities, a time view, and collections (which I haven't played with much). One feature I really appreciate is the ability to beam clusters of files in one go, with no marking required — I can send a whole day's pictures at once, which helps when dumping into iPhoto.The location stuff is the coolest, though. There's a setting in the menu, “Ask for adjacent location”, which can automatically suggest a nearby location when filling in the name of a new place. This makes me think that Album is aware of the approximate geographic locations of the cells (or at least has some graph of adjacency). I really would love to be able to pull all of the location information onto the desktop — the 6630 has awesome EXIF support in its images, but not geographic stuff — so I'm going to dig around in its files. It's times like this that using a Mac is a disadvantage! I bet the Windows client gets this lot for free.In summary, the Album package can completely replace the built-in Camera and Gallery applications for dealing with pictures. Keep Gallery around — Album doesn't really distinguish between photos and videos, and doesn't manage sounds or links — but you won't use it much!

That'll teach me for not keeping up-to-date with software versions! Thanks to Jukka-Pekka, Antti, and Ora for their help.

Posted at 2005-03-28 13:26:37 by Richard • Link to Nokia Album
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