New Web service GRID aggregates photos from your social media sites
Unless you subscribe and pay for cloud-based image hosting services, you probably leverage on free third party hosting sites like the majority of Internet users. For images, we normally upload and publish photos directly on social networking sites, or we leverage on free online services like Plixi, Flickr, and Instagram. Depending on the intended use and outcome, most of us use more than one of these sites with the normal process involving either enabling their auto-cross publishing feature, or copying and pasting the resulting URL across our sites and online profiles. So in a manner of speaking: upload, share then forget about the file source.
While this easily works for content sharing online, this multi-host process can make image asset management a little too challenging. Photos can fall off the grid and forgotten, especially old ones uploaded to services you may or may not have stopped using. Now, Hong Kong-based social media startup vvall offers up a great looking solution with GRID.
What is Grid?
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GRID is a Web app that aggregates photos from image hosting sites and organizes them in, well, a grid-view interface. It was apparently inspired by Kiwi Web developer Mike Harding‘s 2009 Coffee by Week project.
According to vvall co-founder Ray Chan Ching Ching during an interview conducted via e-mail, his team’s main product is the vvall mobile app which saw inception in January and is yet to be furnished and launched. It aims to be a mobile service created around the goal of “collecting and completing one’s memories. It wants to give you a different perspective towards your photos.”
GRID, meanwhile, was created as a related project borne out of a brainstorming session about the vvall app. A week was spent developing it, from idea to its current incarnation.
“GRID is like an appetizer of a meal. We cannot say that it’s a furnished one as it’s pretty raw and simple. Somehow it’s more like a promotion site for the not-yet-launched vvall.”
Features
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The service began with support for Facebook, Twitpic, Picplz, and Dailybooth which sounds like a pretty limited integration roll-out, though of course such can be expected from any upstart online service these days. And while Ching admits that they don’t really have a scheduled roadmap for its development and roll-out (as their focus is manly on their vvall app), GRID is continuously being brewed to offer more features. As such, expansions like aggregations to other services and support for other languages can be expected in the next few months. Case in point: both Instagram and Yfrog integrations were included merely a few days ago.
Photos are organized by date and by days of the week, making it simple to navigate through your images online. Its grid interface’s minimalist layout make it quite the stunner to begin with—clean and intuitive for you to figure out how to work your way around its features. You won’t find the usual clutter that litter most online galleries either.
Conclusion
It has a long way to go as far as third party site aggregations are concerned, given the large number of photo storage cum sharing services online. But despite how “raw” it is, the aptly dubbed GRID can already be seen as a great tool for viewing and managing your photos from different social media sites.
Tags: GRID, Images, online marketing, Online Utilities, Photos, social media marketing, Tool Time, vvall
