I’ve recently talked to the creators of NeroKwik, a new cloud-based photo service which is different from what you have seen or used before. NeroKwik’s goal is to make your photos easy to find and readily available to show and share. This seems like a goal that’s been achieved by other services but if you own several imaging devices like a cellphone, tablet, camera etc… you know that it’s actually very difficult to look at some your photos at a moment’s notice, because they may be on another device.
In my own case, many of my photos are on my phones, others on my computers, and many more on the few other devices and storage location (local our cloud-based) I have. In reality, I mainly have access to Facebook and smartphone photos from the phone itself. The rest is out of reach.Most of the existing solutions would tell you that you need to consolidate (copy) all the photos into a single location, cloud or otherwise. It’s nice, but it is also not very convenient and potentially expensive. The business model of those services is mainly to sell you storage space and HD photos are a great way to market such services. Slow networks also make it difficult to upload gigabytes if not terabytes of photos.
NeroKwik takes a completely different route: instead of copying data around, it builds an index that uses a thumbnail and the physical location of the photo. You can index many locations (smartphones, tablets, computers…) and that’s how NeroKwik builds a global view of all your images. The thumbnail themselves are big enough (1024×768 is common but not the maximum) to be viewed decently on a smartphone/tablet, so most of the time you don’t even need to query the whole image. If you want to, you can ask NeroKwik to download the full-size image from the source location.
You need to install a client on each machine that stores photos, and tell it where to look for them. The basic NeroKwik app is free, but the company intends to build additional premium features (unlimited devices, video, PC) that it will charge a small fee for.
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