Photosynth = Flickr killer? wait for improvements

 
Ever since I read about the official release of Photosynth, I couldnt wait to get home and get my hands on photosynth.  I have looked at the beta site 6 months ago and have been wanting to see it live, hence the urge.
Got to my home, picked up the digital camera, powered it on, storage full message.  Aargs…  Pam(my wife) has filled the 1 GB memory card with pictures.  She was getting out, so I had to clean up the memory card, backing up all the image to my computer and finally picked up the camera and shot around 20 pics of a painting hanging on our livging room wall.  I started photosynth.  Install went smooth.  Created user id as “gajakannan” (ofcourse), and started the “create synth” button, uploaded the pics and waited patiently for the synth to do what it needed to do.  It came up with different messages and finally a message that “100% synthed”.  My eyes lit up and hit the view button.  Viola, my pictures were synth-ed exactly how I envisioned.

I liked the tool.  It was simple to use.  Could have added more inline help.  Some features are not intutive as one would expect.  For example, after I created a synth, there was not a button to delete if I dont like it.  The button was the “x” button that appears on the panel, but not intutive.  Also, if I dont like some pictures from the collection, so far, I have not found a way to delete it.  I am sure, these shortcomings can overcome very soon.

Flickr killer?  barely. 

well, the synth opens up several options that one would not have had before.  For example 1. You are on a family reunion and want to take a picture of everyone with their face still shows up instead of a small dot.  Well, take one full picture and several pictures that will overlap.  Put them in synth and guess what, synth automatically would reconstruct the pictures to look like one.  Pam was telling, can this be merged and made as one picture for printouts?  Microsoft are you listening?

2. Can make a nice zoom in and zoom out slide for powerpoint presentations where we still struggle to put information together in one place.

3. Microsoft should publish webservice based API, like Amazon AWS for photosynth and let the users unlock the power of photosynth.  People could think of so many different uses for synth.

{ Gaja; }