To quote Nseries web site: “Nokia Photos is a PC application designed to let you do more with your images. Just download the application to your compatible PC and you’re ready to edit, back-up, organize, print, convert, and share all the pictures and videos from your compatible PC to your device, as well as your favorite online photofeeds. And you can stop worrying about formats, codecs, resizing, or the other headaches of photo and video management. It’s easy to use, works with all Nokia Nseries devices, and is completely free to download – both as an individual application and as part of the Nokia Nseries PC Suite 2.0.”

After all I wrote about Lifeblog I really wanted to try the new release, so I dug out a computer with WinXP to install Nokia Photos 1.0.232.0.

Downloading a 48.5Mb installable was rather quick. First request from the installer was to install “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package”. Nice one, but I’d say – too much information. If it is required – itstall it, don’t ask me if I want to install it. Clicking ok. Next thing that installer told me was “Dot net 3.0 cannot be found. Please install it from this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70848. Installation was aborted.

Ok, going to Microsoft web site to download another 50Mb worth of stuff. I wouldn’t like to be on dial-up for this installation. After installing .NET framework I restarted Nokia Photos installation and this time it went smooth.

One huge improvement compared to beta version – this release does not uninstall Nokia Lifeblog, if it is installed on the same computer. The two seem to peacefully coexist.

First start of the Photos application took about a minute – with just logo hanging in the middle of the screen. After that I was asked if I would like to import data from Lifeblog into Nokia Photos.

I decided not to import old data just yet, since I was warned by the application that it might take some time. After that application froze for about 20 seconds – as it became clear later it was detecting my phone connected to the PC via bluetooth. After phone was successfully detected Nokia Photos asked if I would like to set up automatic item copying.

After playing with the application settings for a while I decided to import my old Lifeblog data, but couldn’t find how to do it from the menu. Fortunately I have chosen to be reminded to import old items on next Photos start – otherwise I wouldn’t know how to get my data into Photos.

Importing 26.000 items from old database took more than 15,5 hours. No time estimate was given for this operation, just percentage gauge and “X of Y items converted” message that was updated for each 25 items. Somewhere around 60% my thoughts were “waiting that long? it better be good”.

Importing reported a few errors in the end: “Some items could not be imported since there was an error or the file format is not supported by Nokia Photos.”. I couldn’t copy a list of failed items, so now I don’t know how to check which items I lost.

Unfortunately after dismissing import failed dialog Nokia Photos crashed with “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation”. Restarting the application and restarting the computer didn’t help – now Photos crash on application start. All my data is still accessible in Lifeblog 2.5, but I couldn’t complete this Nokia Photos review.

Waiting for feedback from the development team – I’ll update this blogpost as soon as the problem is fixed. Hopefully the problem concerns only import of large databases.

Update 16 Jan 2008: allmighty Photos development team did some magic with my database and the application started to work. A fix for this particular case will be available in the next version of Photos application.

But now to the new features in Nokia Photos 1.0.

• “Organise” view

The biggest change is that timeline view with all context information is now just secondary view. The main view is Picasa-like folder/albums based “Organise” view that contains only images and videos. After Lifeblog data is imported there are several albums created “Lifeblog 2001″, “Lifeblog 2002″, etc. Search is almost as powerful as in Timeline view – calendar entries, automatic location tags, etc. are taken into account. The only thing missing is proximity searching – when a related sms can be found next to the picture that you are actually looking for.

• Synchronisation

Now synchronisation with the mobile start automatically when it appears in PC vicinity. Synchronisation also runs in the background, so it is possible to continue using application while it is downloading latest pictures and messages from the mobile.

Synchronisation with my N81 via bluetooth was a bit problematic – I had to restart Photos and N81 several times before it actually started. Same phone and same computer synced just fine with Lifeblog 2.5.

To copy data from PC to the phone items now have to be placed into a special album called “Sync Tray”. I find it more confusing than special “To Phone” view in Lifeblog 2.5. Generalisation is good only until it becomes counter-intuitive. Yes, “To Phone” is technically just another album, but at the same time it is used for something totally different. It is the same story as with the Favourites in Lifeblog 2.5 – “favourite” is technically just another tag, but it is not a good enough reason to put it into the tag manager.

• Favourites

Favourites view is back (was replaced in Lifeblog 2.5 with special tag). Now there’s an album called Favourites where user is able to see all items marked as favourite. On the downside – it is not possible to mark item favourit by selecting “Make favourite” from context menu – you need to drag and drop it to Favourites album or select Add to Album->Favourites.

• Tags

Tag manager in Lifeblog 2.5 was awful. In Photos it became a tag cloud. It looks really good, and is easy to use. For some reason help files refer to Tools->Open Tag Manager and to the icon in toolbar, while in reality it is in View->Open Tag Manager and is the icon is on the right side of the window.

• Show/Hide

Show/Hide is back (was mutilated in Lifeblog 2.5 where it became a part of tag manager functionality and had a negative logic – you had to deselect item time to make it visible) – now it is easy again to select which content types to display.

• “Flip item”

This eye-candy feature (activated by Ctrl+M) flips an item and shows location and content tags on its back .

• “Make movee”

This feature allows to edit videos – similar to what can be done on Nseries mobiles with Movee. I’m sure fans of home-made videos will love this feature.

• “Order Prints”

Allows to print photos using selected service providers in some countries. Interesting that this feature appeared in Nokia product when people started to prefer to keep their pictures in digital form.

• Performance

Nokia Photos is considerably slower than Lifeblog 2.5 – from application startup, to scrolling through thumbnails to opening full screen images. It is painfully slow. Sometimes it just freezes for 20-30 seconds without any indication of what it is actually doing.

• Organise/Timeline

Organise and Timeline views in one application created a Frankenstein monster. These are two completely different approaches to data organisation, and that kind of mix is really confusing. I believe that applciation developers should give their vision to the user, rather than overwhelm with features and customisation possibilites and force him/her to make choices.

Conclusion

Nokia Photos is an interesting experiment, but I would wait at least until next release before considering it as a primary application for content organisation. Bad performance kills the cumulative positive effect of the new design, eye-candies and new features.

I wish Lifeblog had a notification about new version in the application itself, like PC Suite has, so that those using older versions will know that there’s an update.

Installation on top of Lifeblog 2.1 was smooth. First visual impression – I’m in the dungeon. Light gray and orange tones of Lifeblog 2.0/2.1 are now replaced with black and blue colours. Especially dark it looks on low resolutions (like 1024×768 on my laptop) where black elements occupy greater part of the screen. Of course, appreciation of colours is very subjective. But taking into account the change that Nseries web site palette has undergone just a couple of weeks ago -
from black to light gray, the change in Lifeblog from light to dark is a bit surprising.

Next big surprise – my favourite items in the timeline have disappeared. Or rather the “favourites” tab has disappeared. Now instead of the blue frame favourites are indicated by a yellow star. It took me quite some time to figure out how to see only favourite items in the new version. You have to click on Tags button in the top right corner and select Favourites from the Content tags section.

Tag Manager is an interesting tool. It allows to rename/delete location and content tags, and choose types of items to be displayed in the timeline. Each of the tags/item types has a “hide” checkbox, which is from my point of view counterintuitive. It is more common to have to tick a checkbox to show something, rather that to hide something. It is really good that the good old search field that allows to display only wanted items on the timeline is still there.

Unfortunately filtering timeline using Tag Manager is not very intuitive and it is not consistent with the normal search.

• There’s a tag “Favourites” in the Tag Manager, but it is only selectable from the Tag Manager, it is not possible to search for “Favourites”.

• Searching by location and content is really simple with the “old” search – e.g. “Finland, church”. With the Tag Manager one has to use Ctrl-click to select one location tag and one content tag.

• Selecting tags produces less results that search, because it doesn’t look for contact/calendar data or even title of the item

• Tags are case-sensitive. “Kuusamo” and “kuusamo” are different locations, and selecting both of them results in no found items at all

Overall impression is that instead of an intuitive search bar where you just type what you need, users are encouraged to use a techie-oriented interface.

Another new interesting feature is item stacking. Explanation of the feature in Lifeblog Help is quite strange – it looks like “Stacking on the PC” topic is just a template. There are several new items in the View menu – Increase Stacking, Decrease Stacking, Open Stack, Close Stack. From what this feature does it looks like it groups items that are close to each other in time – the more the level of stacking, the wider timespan is used. Maximum level of stacking places all items that belong to the same day in one stack.

I haven’t found any shortcuts to increase/decrease stacking or open/close stack functions, so each action requires selecting an item from the menu (main or context). I’m not really sure what is the purpose of this feature – it doesn’t seem to improve the navigation or visual experience in the timeline.

New slide show implementation is pretty cool. It is possible to add background music and enable Ken Burns effect. When selecting the track for the background music I wasn’t able to select AAC tracks that I imported using Nokia Music Manager – only MP3 format is supported.

At last seek bars were introduced for video and audio clip playback – it is especially good since modern mulimedia computers are capable of recording pretty long videos.

Probably the best new feature in release 2.5 is image editing. Although image editing functionality is pretty basic (brightness, contrast, sharpness adjustment, cropping, red-eye removal, sepia/b&w and auto adjust), it is sufficient for everyday use.

Modified images are saved next to the original in the timeline – this is a great advantage over Picasa’s approach that doesn’t save the modified image in a file by default. Here I can see a usecase for the special type of stacking – so that only last edited version is visible, and the original is hidden under it. Also tilting would be extremely handy.

Despite a few hickups it looks like Lifeblog is continuing to evolve into direction of the ultimate mobile media management tool with excellent usability and visual innovation. Data organisation in timeline and possibility to search both on mobile and PC in a Mac Spotlight are still its killer features. Let’s see what comes next.

N93i also has integrated newer Lifeblog version than original N93 (although N93 software update 11.0.034 has the same Lifeblog as N93i).

It was also announced that N93i is the first Nseries device to support VOX blogging service. Other compatible devices require users to download special settings file. While this is all true for posting to VOX from Gallery, it was not mentioned that Lifeblog on all Nseries devices supports posting to VOX, Typepad, Flickr and MovableType.

Lifeblog enthusiast posted detailed instructions in his blog "Lifeblog – How to…" how to  set up blog accounts with all these services. So users have an alternative way to post to VOX from N93i and other Nseries multimedia computers

I’ve seen Lifeblog transformation from a venture fighting for its place under the sun to an application that is now an integral part of all Nokia Nseries multimedia computers. And I am proud that I have been a part of this transformation.

It’s been a year since Lifeblog project was transferred to Nokia Multimedia, and now it has firmly established its place in the complex machine of the business unit. I’m sure that Lifeblog has a great future and most importantly it has a great team to drive it forward.

But for me it is time to move on – my skills are needed in another part of organisation.

I would like to say big thanks to all the people that I had a chance to work with on Lifeblog project! It was a great pleasure to work with you!

"From little seeds do great ideas grow" and makes a couple of remarks about Lifeblog that correlate with my own thoughts on the subject:

[...]
Digital imaging takes away the “click anxiety”, and Lifeblog’s removed the fear of filing.

[...]
Having played with Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 for a while, I think this is kind
of a transformative moment for how we interact with the last category.
It’s still at the Mosaic-like stage of development (go read your
browser wars history), but it’s useable. I look forward to the Windows
Explorer paradigm going the way of MS-DOS.

Thank you, Martin!

Here are a few quotes to illustrate it:

“I have stopped using Lifeblog and will now upload my pictures using Shozu?”

“ive never seen the point of blogs, i odnt think anyone wants to read my life story and im not sure i want to tell everyone”

“please can somebody tell me for what is this good for?
lifeblog: you upload pics and everybody can see it?
why should I do that?”

“I dont use the PC software at all, seems useless.”

While as Lifeblog definitely has blogging capabilities, it doesn’t make it a solely blogging application. Blogging is just a part of Lifeblog functionality, and I dare to say not the most important one, even if the name suggests otherwise.

Having said that, I should mention that moblogging is still important for Nokia. In new Nokia Nseries multimedia computers – N72, N73, and N93, that were launched two weeks ago in Berlin, you will find yet another Nokia solution for moblogging (in addition to Lifeblog) that enables posting images to Flickr right from Camera and Gallery applications.

So what is Lifeblog good for besides moblogging? Three things mainly:

1. Organising and archiving your images, videos and other personal content
Integrated cameras in Nokia Nseries multimedia computers are pretty good and very much suitable for recording your daily life. If you bought a cameraphone, you most probably use the camera in it. You also send text and multimedia messages, make some text or audio notes. All these small bits are a part of your daily life and are in the end your personal contect that you create.

Archiving (synchronising) personal content from mobile to PC is a natural way to keep it safe.
Many Lifeblog users mention that after they’ve started using the application, they started taking more pictures with their phones. The reason is simple – you know that your pictures will not disappear in the digital void, but will be stored on your PC.

Of course just copying images from the phone is not a rocket science. You can do it with PC Suite as well. Many people still manually orgnise their photos into a folder structure with the dates as folder names to store their images. Timeline in Lifeblog might not look like a great invention at first, but as soon as you collect even just a few weeks of your life – you’ll clearly see the value in it. It simply presents all your data at once, so that you can see what messages you’ve sent and recieved while you took this or that picture, what thoughts you’ve recorded after a certain event. And that brings us to the next topic:

2. Value of Context

It is easy to underestimate importance of context information. You do transfer your images from your regular digital camera using camera manufacturer’s proprietory software and you then you use some application to organise your images, or may be just do it yourself in Windows Explorer. So what’s a big deal about Lifeblog then?

What you digital camera cannot do (unlike Nseries multimedia computers is to collect context information. You take a picture, copy it to your PC and then forget about it for half a year. How do you find it later on? Or how do you remember who are these people on the picture, where this picture was taken, what street, town or even country?

For highly organised people the obvious solution to this problem is to rename files to something more sensible than e.g. IMG01941.jpg. But that requires a lot of effort (and self-discipline). Another option is to upload everything online to a service like Flickr and assign tags to every picture. Manual tagging requires self-discipline and a certain effort as well.

Well, there’s yet another solution. I don’t want to overstate it, but Lifeblog does all this for you.
Text messages sent and recieved before and after a picture has been taken serve as a pretty good marker for what you’re looking or for describing a picture. They are automatic tags if you will.

A recent example from my life. I’ve been on a business trip to Manchester earlier this week and took a few pictures downtown. We were supposed to meet our colleagues and we were texting each other to find a place to meet. One of the texts that I’ve sent was something like “We’re on the Oxford street, near the library. See you in 5.” This message is now ebmedded into the timeline amongst a few pictures that I took on Oxford street. So next time I browse through my Timeline, I will know where the pictures were taken without any extra effort.

Some people say they don’t want their text messages to be synchronised or stored or even shown in Lifeblog. It is really easy to choose content types to be displayed, but leaving them out of the Timeline completely would be wrong because they add valuable context to your images.

Lifeblog also captures other context information such as – cellular network information (including country name), calendar information for all items in the timeline, full contact information for text and multimedia messages. All these bits are sort of automatic tags and are adding value to your personal content.

I hope I convinced you that context information is really important, even if it is not visible. And that brings us to the next topic:

3. Search

Context information by itself has a certain value, but it’s real value can be unleashed only by search.

With all the context information saved by Lifeblog it is quite easy to find events, photographs of the people, memories and simply valuable information. Suppose you have had a summer party with your friends last year, but you can’t remember when. Just search for your friends’ names and “party” – there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find what you want, becuase most likely you’ve texted them invitations.

A much simpler example – you’ve been on a weekend trip to Sweden – just type “Sweden”, and you’ll get all images/videos/messages you’ve created or recieved while on this trip.

You can read more about search in “Search in Lifeblog 2.0″.

Besides a regular text search on the mobile and on PC, there’s another type of search available.
Did you know that you can find all items from the same location using Lifeblog PC application?
It is quite interesting to see which places you have been into over time. And by the way, it is possible to assign automatic location tags to certain locations, so that all content created later in the same location will be automatically tagged.

Today Nokia announced three new Nseries phones and N93 amongst them. This is a new transformer and a first one that has Lifeblog 2.0 application in ROM, which means that user content with valuable context information will be collected right from the first start of the phone.

It was one of Christian Lindholm’s predictions (or may be wishes?) in mobile trends for 2006 that more transformers are coming.

I’ve taken a lot of pictures last summer during our Scandinavian trip with the first Nseries transformer – N90 and blogged them using Lifeblog from the road. Now I’ve been using N93 for quite a while and I should say that with S60 3.0, Carl Zeiss lens, 3x optical zoom, DVD quality video recording – this is my phone until the next transformer comes out.

It is really good to see that more and
more people are starting to use Lifeblog.
With the new version 2.0 available for download from the beginning of
April all Nseries phone owners can enjoy new functionality of the
application. However, it looks like some important features that make
Lifeblog to be so much more that just blogging or album application
are yet undiscovered by the majority of users.

Those who have
used Lifeblog prior to version 2.0 already know that country name is
automatically attached to all pictures taken with the phone’s camera.
In the new version this functionality might look the same, but in
fact there’s much more to it.

First of all, not only the
country information is now stored, but also complete network
information. Lifeblog PC allows you to create automatic location
tags, so that all items stored in the same location will be
automatically identified.

In addition to that calendar entries
are stored so that it is possible to find items created during
certain meetings or events. E.g. just recently we had a meeting in a
conference center in Båtvik, and I had a meeting marked in my
calendar. Subject of the meeting and its location were saved along
with images that I took during that meeting.

All metadata
(network information, calendar data, contact information for
messages) is now stored not only for images and videos, but also for
text and multimedia messages, text notes audio clips and blog posts.

And yes, now coming to the most
important part – just press ’9′ while in the timeline or select
Options/Find from the menu. I bet you’ll be surprised by the results
– there’s much more to be found in your life line than you thought.