Introducing Nokia Photos, one of the integral cogs within the Nokia Ovi Suite machine.

Nokia Photos, as one might surmise, is a photo organizing application that provides you with a seamless integration between the PC, Nokia handset and Ovi services on the Internet. In essence, Nokia Photos is a great tool which helps to organize those precious and happy moments with ease.

Other then organising photos, Nokia Photos also provide users with the ability to organize SMS, MMS and even videos from the phone. Few companies have provided such a level of integration between the computer, phone and the Internet. Fret not if you’re a Mac user. Nokia is also working on Ovi suite for the Mac OSx. Mac users would have to wait a little longer to enjoy the services which Ovi has to offer, but as they say, it’s better late than never.

Getting Nokia Photos

As mentioned, Nokia Photos is part of the Ovi Suite, so installing Ovi Suite will be the first step in getting Nokia Photos up and running.

Installation of Ovi Suite is rather simple. First, download the Ovi Suite installation from:
http://www.ovi.com/services/support/nokiaovisuite

Upon starting the installation, the installer will download the Ovi Suite applications and required software add-ons automatically.

After which, Nokia Photos can be accessed via your start menu Start > All Programs > Nokia > Ovi Photos

Synchronizing with Nokia Photos

Being a rather smart software, Nokia Photos will automatically detect the handset which is connected to the PC (you can choose from a wide range of connectivity options). You can then select the items you want to synchronize with Nokia Photos (SMS, MMS, Photos and Videos) which will all be stored into your PC into folders organized by months.

Sometimes you may wish to copy some images from your computer over to your handset, perhaps to show your friends the nice images you took during your last trip. In Nokia Photos select the files stored on the PC and drag them over into phone (in this example, the 5800 XpressMusic) displayed in the menu on the left and the selected images will be copied over to the phone.

Organizing your photos

Organizing photos can be quite a tedious process and at times frustrating if there are no suitable tools to help you out with. Nokia Photos helps to ease that pain by providing a few nifty tricks for organising photos.

1) Tags

There are 2 tags available to organize your photos. Firstly, there is the content tag which lets you describe the photo, similar to how tags are utilized on blogs. Secondly, location tags which let you organize according to where the photo was taken. Tags are useful as it makes locating photos a lot easier, so if I have 100 photos which I took over the months or during the All-American Reject concert here in Singapore, I can easily filter it out from the entire photo library by selecting the appropriate tag.

2) Map

If your handset has an integrated GPS chipset, imagine what you can do with the geo-tagging feature. For one, images that have been geo-tagged will be sorted and show up on the exact location at which it was taken. Alternatively, you can locate the position and drag images into the map location, this lets you browse the images based on location in the map.

3) Timeline

Now timeline is somewhat an interesting aspect to organize your photos. As the name implies, photos or videos are shown in a sequence based on time and date the image was taken. This function is great as it enables you to trace back the series of events that transpired, just be looking at the photos or videos taken during that timeframe. Think of it as a little story of your day to day muses and happenings. And this is not limited to photos and videos only. Remember how Nokia Photos also synchronizes your text messages? That’s right, you’ll also see your text messages over that specific timeline laid out for you to review.

Storing your photos on Ovi share

What better way to save your memories than to put your files on the Ovi servers? As mentioned, Nokia has covered all grounds when it comes to service integration, and this is apparent with Ovi Share’s unlimited capacity for your images. All you have to do is set up an Ovi account, fire up the upload function in Nokia Photos (located at the lower right section), configure Nokia Photo to login to your Ovi account and you’re ready to upload your images to Ovi Share.

After selecting the images you what to upload, select the upload function. An upload dialogue will be presented. Several options are available, from this dialogue you can choose to give a title to this set, add comments and put an option to include tags for the images.

After the photos have been uploaded, the photos can be accessed via the Ovi website. You can choose to share the photos with friends, add tags and even put them up on social networks like Digg and Technorati.

Final Thoughts

Nokia Photos is an easy to use photo organizer with a couple of nifty features such as Maps and Timeline for quick and easy referencing. More importantly, Nokia’s inclusion of its Ovi Share service that provides unlimited storage fulfills its mantra to integrate your life seamlessly with your PC, the web and the world.

And if you are somewhat of a multimedia junkie, check out the muvee function within Nokia Photos. This feature basically takes the images and videos to make it into a nice little video presentation. The version included with Nokia Photos is rather stripped down and only allows up to 3 videos and 30 images to be included in the created video. Want the full experience? You can do so, by activating the 21 days free trial, or go for the full version with a US$49.95 purchase.

Consider for a fact that there’s absolutely zero cost pegged to it (sans the muvee feature which isn’t really necessary), and it’s safe to say that Nokia Photos has the makings of a great album organizer. So if you’re looking for an all in one photo management tool, it’s time to download Nokia Photos right now.