Technology

Wedding photo albums used to be comprised of professional shots taken by the photographer.  Then came disposable cameras and event coordinators everywhere started placing these little cardboard quick-snaps on each table for candid shots.  More recently, people have started using the cameras on their cell phones to capture impromptu moments of the happy couple or other guests living it up on the dance floor.  As shwup’s website explains, “One guy promises to email his shots around. Somebody else plans to post their pictures online. The third person swears he’ll send everyone a DVD, as soon as he edits his video.  And do you ever get to see any of those pictures?  Yeah, we already know the answer. That’s why we built shwup.  We make it fall-off-your-chair easy for you to get everyone’s photos and videos together online in a shared private album.”

There are a few things that set shwup apart from most photo sharing websites out there.  Once you create an album, shwup allows you to send invites to others to view the collection and also add their own pictures or videos.  However, invitees do not need to create a unique user ID with shwup in order to contribute to your album.  Also, shwup allows for the creation of “muvees”.  Using the images and videos in your album, the program can sync music transitions to picture transitions for a dramatic and fun take on the normal “slide show”.  Shwup creates these “muvees” to stock music that is part of the website but it also allows for users to import their own music.  In addition, each album is capable of having separate guest lists so you don’t have to worry about your new mother-in-law finding the bachelor party pictures.

While shwup is still in a beta phase, there are still some features which are functioning perfectly.  Images can be uploaded from your computer, Facebook, Flickr, or any website address.  Photo albums can be embedded in web pages and added to Facebook sites.  If an invitee has multiple formats that they want to submit, say a JPG file, an MPG movie and another movie in QT format, all three can be uploaded at the same time from the same e-mail.  Videos will be transcoded into flash video so that everyone can enjoy the finished product.  Album originators receive an e-mail whenever new content is added.  That way cool content can be immediately enjoyed and questionable content can be removed. 

Once again, software companies are embracing Web 2.0 technology to showcase “lite” versions of their product.  Muvee’s shwup site is actually a creative way for the parent company to expose a large audience to a basic version of its more feature-rich full-blown movie editing package, Reveal.  As predicted in Talkibie’s coverage of Photoshop Express, this is another company’s foray into RIA which will familiarize users with a format and encourage those ready to take the next technological step forward into the realm of retail software.  So long as products like shwup are created, I can’t imagine anyone complaining.

By Alicen Hogan