Club Photo, an online image-sharing and organizing company, has brought Album To Go, an interactive photo album that runs on the Palm operating system, to the marketplace.
“It’s the very first photo-sharing application for the Palm,” Club Photo president and CEO Andrew Wei told TWICE.com. “Palm users are among the most dedicated of electronics consumers. Now we’ve expanded what they can do with Palm devices and given consumers a new and quite easy way to share photos.”
Album To Go comes in Windows and Macintosh versions and allows users to upload pictures from their computer desktops or from a Club Photo online album. The selected images are transferred to the Palm device when the user next backs up information. Pictures are displayed in either 16-bit or 4-bit grayscale resolution. They can then be transferred from one Palm device to another by using the handheld’s infrared beam. (The Palm III, IIIx, IIIe, V and VII all have beaming capability. The original Palm Pilot does not.)
“What Club Photo is doing will, I think, redefine the photo-sharing process,” Wei said. “Instead of carrying photographs around in a wallet, people will carry digital images with them in their handheld devices. And this is an improvement because the photos can be updated, transferred, copied and shared. These things just cannot be done with regular wallet-sized photos.”
He said as screens on handheld devices improve during the next few years, interest in carrying digital images will increase. “This will be good for digital imaging, but it will also be a huge boost to the handheld market.”
The Album To Go application is provided free on the Club Photo web site, where the company also provides services such as online photo albums for organizing pictures and a fee-based system for ordering prints and other products. (Club Photo has a popular product called the Amazing Photo Cookie. You can order up a batch of cookies with your picture in the glaze)
