Steves71’s Blog

I’ve been using Shozu to upload photos from my phone to Flickr for a few years, but recently I’ve also been trying out Nokia’s Share Online. Neither of them is perfect but for my personal usage I’m being drawn more towards Share Online. They can both upload Photo’s and Video’s to a number of sites and both can be used to write and publish blog posts.

Where Shozu wins over Share Online is in the sites it supports, there are loads of them, all the major ones are catered for, whereas Share Online only supports Flickr, Ovi and Vox. In an older version of the application there was an option to send to email and configure your own destinations but this has been removed for some reason and is a real problem if you don’t use one of the three sites it supports, Shozu still has the post to email option. Shozu also allows cross posting, you can upload a file to multiple sites in one go, and not only that but it uploads once to their server, then from there sends it out to your chosen destinations, this can save you using huge amounts of data as you only upload once. So its round one to Shozu for supporting nearly every photo/video/blogging host there is.

Secondly is Geo-Tagging. Shozu has the option to tag your photos as they are taken with coordinates taken from your phones gps. When these photos are uploaded to a site that supports geo-tagging such as Flickr the coordinates are placed in a tag and the location the photo was taken can be viewed on a map. Share online doesn’t have this feature built in, but Nokia have an application called Location Tagger, this embeds the coordinates into the EXIF data of the photo. Once uploaded to Flickr via Share Online (or any other method) it can also be viewed on a map. Both methods have their pros and con’s. With the way Shozu does it if you move your photo’s to a computer and upload them from there or upload them with anything other than Shozu the location data is lost. With Nokia’s Location Tagger this doesn’t happen because the info is stored within the photo’s EXIF data, but it does mean that if you location tag a photo then later decide that you don’t want its location to be public it’s not easy to remove without a computer. Both applications score equally in that round.

Where Shozu is let down is in the way it uses access points, you compile a list of access points and place them in the order that you want them to be used. So you could have your home wifi first, followed by works wifi and finally your packet data connection. When you upload a file it checks the first access point on the list, if it can’t find it then it moves to the next, then the next until it does find one it can connect to and starts the upload. This sounds great, but what if you’ve in a different country where roaming charges are huge, especially data charges. This happens to me when I go to the Isle of Man, even if I use one of their own networks sim cards £10 would get me 20MB whereas back home £10 will get me 1gig, it’s a huge difference. So I rely on finding open wifi access points. With Shozu this means when I find a new one I have to add it to my phones list of access points, then go into Shozu and add it there too. This makes a quick walk by upload impossible unless it’s a place I’ve used before, even then that particular access point needs to be near the top of the list to make it a quick upload. Share Online works like most other applications, you can set it to prompt you to select an access point when you upload, select search for wlan, choose the one you want and upload, quick and simple. This is one of the main reasons I’m growing to like it over Shozu.