Kodak Easy Share Gallery Review

I have used Kodak Gallery extensively over the past 5 years for a repository and distribution method of journaling more than 10,000 travel photos. Prior to a couple of years ago it worked great for me, both at the uploading and the distribution end. But with a cut-over a couple of years ago to an all Adobe Flash slide-show facility, this pretty much killed the usability of it for me and particularly on the viewer end of things. From the performance side, my viewing audience took a hit with the new Adobe Flash slide-show requiring a full initial download of the entire album in order to present it. At the higher resolution of today's digital cameras and with a major portion of my audience still on dial-up or with older hardware, I immediately lost all of that section of my audience. Then with the elimination of captions in normal HTML at the bottom of the photo, on the new Flash slide-show a single line of the caption was all that was displayed. To view the entire caption, one had to hover the mouse over the caption and continue repeating this action each time the bubble-text caption timed out. The software became totally unusable for the majority of my viewer's purposes.

There is no arguing that in the field with my most recent work from Central America, I simply couldn't have found a better way to upload photos than with Kodak EasyShare client on my laptop. I had all day to shoot, all night to compose captions and write narratives and attach to each photo, arrange the album and ready my laptop for the next day's upload to Kodak. I was able to leave the laptop in many instances in the hands of the Internet cafe shop owner where by the time I had finished lunch, I was able to retrieve my laptop and all the photos had been successfully stored on Kodak's servers, ready for distribution.

Then with the Adobe Flash cut-over a few years ago, my audience gained previously during nearly 2 years of traveling began to rapidly deplete. I received constant complaints from viewers stating the slide-show would not display on their older computers or slow dial-up or satellite connections. I was also quizzed as to why I stopped including captions. I WAS still supplying the captions! Just no one could figure out how to read them. Finally checking my viewer logs, almost no one was viewing my journals any longer. I began to search for other facilities and am curently reviewing some other serices, one of them being my own leased virtual server with software such as the Gallery2 Open Source free software. Until this comes to furition, however, I still turn to Kodak from time to time for family stuff but the limitations are still there.

October 2009 Update:
Somewhat encouraging but still confusing, Kodak came out with a new release of their end-viewer web software last week (early October, 2009). Some of mine and other's complaints must have striken a note. 

Improvements:
• They did implement a way to overlay each photo with the caption as a one click per photo requirement that results in longer captions overlaying the actual photo.
• They possibly made improvements in the initial wait as the Adobe Flash slide-show is loaded.

Moderate Misses:
• Still no facility to turn off the Flash slide-show and use the old HTML style (why can't this be a viewer option; why do they have to force the use of Flash when it causes slow networks and old hardware to have problems?)
• Brought the viewable list of distribution under Adobe Flash viewer control, thus my 15M FIOS network now takes nearly two minutes to display the initial page of the list of who I have sent my albums to 

Major Misses:
• Tons of wasted "black space" surround each photo in the Flash slide-show that is not utilized (why can't the captions be put in the gutter and why was the implementation of caption display done on top of the photograph instead of some of the massive unused space
• Loss of the "Guestbook" feature is the final failure to meet my own needs and reason for today preparing for a final goodbye to Kodak (if I can't see who viewed my albums, then for me there is no way to gauge if I should continue to pour all the work into providing them to my audience - on this particular faux pas, case closed Kodak!)

Summary:
I am uncertain where Kodak will go tomorrow with what I consider this latest butchering of their initial fine offering. As a traveling photo journalist, I am actually quite sorry to lose them. I have to wonder though how a company can ignore the cries of its user community and who they actually do take direction from. It wasn't until my own complaints went constantly unanswered that I decided to snail-mail the CEO of Kodak in Rochester. But as a flailing dinosaur would do my concerns seemed only to roll down the bumpy back to land at the feet of the customer service manager.

The strangest thing about speaking to her was that there seemed to be no point of focus to their development effort. I caught the jest that the customer service department was somehow only responsible for funneling complaints to some very third party-ish entity lingering out there "in the mist", some magical source who ejected these things out of the clouds and upon innocent users, hoping we accepted each of them with as little rumblings as possible. And as somewhat proof of this, certainly none of my suggestions that were escalated to the top of the company have been implemented in a literal sense. Flash still rules, along with the banner "Flash - Love it or leave it".  Captions still overlay photo data, require action to display and blank gutter space occupies the land of nothingness while remaining unclaimed.

Final word to Kodak:

Without the "Guestbook" feature I simply have no use for the latest version of this software.  But in their defense I suppose that eliminating photographer's ability to see who is viewing their work is one way to stop complaints about depleting viewers. ;-)

Perhaps tomorrow, usability will again be incorporated into what was previously a really great photo sharing offering.  Adobe Flash, simply for Flash's sake as well as constant unneeded not-really-improvements seems not always the best direction.