Create instant photoblogs with splashBlog

I guess I'm getting lazy. I've got an excellent digital camera, but I can never bring myself to carry the thing, preferring instead to snap pictures on the fly with my Treo 650. The pictures may be grainy if I print them, but they look fine online. The trick is getting the pictures online quickly in a form that people can easily view. Enter SplashBlog, an easy-to-use photoblogging application for smartphones and other wireless devices. With SplashBlog on my phone, and my account at SplashBlog.com, I can shoot, caption, and post pictures almost instantly from anywhere I have a connection.

First-time success without stress

My first experience with SplashBlog was photoblogging my cousin's wedding. It was really simple. Start SplashBlog. Select Camera. Snap picture. Select Save. Wait a few seconds for the SplashBlog Edit dialog box to appear so I can add a title and caption, tweak the date and time, or delete the picture if I don't like it. Either select OK to save the photo and text, or Sync to wirelessly synchronize the new entry with the wedding photoblog I set up on http://www.splashblog.com. Repeat until done.

Then all I had to do was send the bride and groom an email with the link to the photoblog on the Web. Mission accomplished. Hearing how good the photos looked and how nice it was to see pictures so soon after the wedding only added icing to the cake. That's when I decided I really liked SplashBlog and should probably stop winging it and actually look at the manual for the first time.

SplashBlog on your mobile device

SplashBlog is the application you load onto your wireless device to capture, caption, and upload images to the photoblog. As shown in Figure A, the SplashBlog interface is clean and easy to work with.

The figure shows my handheld subscribed to a single blog (go to http://www.splashblog.com/apartmentviews to see the actual blog) that I created for this review. From this screen you can create a new blog, edit an existing one, synchronize your wireless device with the blog, and subscribe to additional SplashBlogs, if you know their URL and the blog you want to connect to is set up for public access.

Tapping the blog in this screen opens it, and makes the individual entries visible, as shown in Figure B.

From this screen you can tap a picture to view it, return to the home screen, activate the camera to take photos and add them to the blog, add a photo already stored on the device, and synchronize your device with the blog.

SplashBlog's developers are sensitive to the limitations of current mobile and wireless technology. In the interest of saving time, memory on your device, and minutes on your mobile phone plan, you can have SplashBlog store and display only the most recent 25 images on the device. Similarly, you can configure it to download smaller versions of the images that are stored on the SplashBlog site.

Working with SplashBlog.com

While taking photos with your wireless device is what SplashBlog is all about, the best way to manage those photos is with SplashBlog.com and your desktop computer. As of this writing, you can create a SplashBlog account and store up to 500 photos in any number of separate blogs, all for free (go beyond 500 photos and you will have to pay a small yearly fee for unlimited storage).

The key location at the site is your Blog Admin Page, shown in Figure C. From here you have complete control over all your blogs. You can even upload photos from your computer hard drive, making SplashBlog a way to post all your photos and make them available to wireless devices or anyone with a Web browser.

Your Blog Admin Page has more features than we can describe here, including a Group Blogs page that displays all the comments you have posted to any SplashBlog, whether you own it or not. I can't think of a blog feature or control that's missing from this area.

Conclusion

SplashBlog is a great way to publish photos from wireless devices. I found it easy to get up and running without referring to the documentation, and it is just fun to be able to capture photos of an event on your wireless device, and post them from the field.

I particularly like the way you can include photos from your desktop machine as well as those from your wireless device. My brother and I posted photos from our vacation, mixing photos from my Treo with shots from his regular digital camera. We easily created a blog that combines my quick but fuzzy candids with his high-resolution composed pictures, so now all our friends know what we were up to (hmm... maybe that's NOT such a good thing...).

This program merits a rating of 4. There are some minor issues with the documentation and some of the features work differently on a PC than on a wireless device. But these are the kind of issues you would expect to see with a product that is evolving fast like this one. SplashBlog is a solid, fun way to blog your mobile (or any digital) photos.

SplashBlog is also available for Windows Mobile and Symbian OS devices.