Not content with just offering traditional photo and video sites, Pixelpipe (which is in essence an aggregator service, allowing you to upload your media to them once from your mobile, and they organise sending it out to multiple destinations; very much like ping.fm offers for Social Networking sites) have now added support for FourSquare.  You can now use the Shout function in FourSquare to send information including a shortened pi.pe link back to your photo, audio or video file.

Although with most platforms you cannot yet Check-In with Pixelpipe, this does start offering the ability to use the service; with Pixelpipe’s latest Android client, however, you can even Check-In directly with their application (and any photos uploaded and distributed on to Flickr from their Android client will also contain the relevant foursquare:venue_id machine tag too).

For Symbian users, you can use the Pixelpipe Share Online function (available in the Ovi Store) to allow you to upload your content to Pixelpipe; and although you can’t Check-In as already stated, you can, of course, use the new FourSquare support in Gravity to Check-In using that application too.

I’ve been a ShoZu user (which offers similar features and distribution options to Pixelpipe) for some time, but given the memory usage that ShoZu takes constantly, I can understand for those who don’t want automatic upload of every picture / video (something that ShoZu is still unique in offering), then something like Pixelpipe (and their Share Online support for Symbian, or their native Android client) is a sensible way forward.

To get their Android Pixelpipe Pro client (free of charge for a short while), head to http://tr.im/pixelpipe directly from your mobile.

To get their Share Online support for Symbian, simply go to http://m.pixelpipe.com/nokia direct from your mobile.

A few weeks back, we carried an article about Devicescape’s plan to start charging for their app on S60.  Well, since they recently had their issues with the iPhone version (which we covered here and here), which ultimately lead them to returning to the iTunes App Store, but as a free app, they have taken the decision to apply the same logic to all their clients, and hence they plan to leave all clients as free clients for the time being.

This is, in our opinion, good news for Devicescape, as we’ve already seen a lot of people move away from ShoZu since their decision to start charging for downloading their client.

We should point out that selecting Devicescape from the Nokia Download! client will still incur a fee, but their client will be free from the Ovi Store.

One complaint levelled at Nokia’s Share Online service is that it’s limited to 3 services (Flickr, Ovi and Vox).  Well, that’s not quite true.  Although no other services are available for configuration from Nokia (and you can’t add your own manually), it seems some companies have fathomed out what’s involved, and will allow you to connect Share Online to their services…

Firstly, one of the popular twitter image sites, mobypicture have provided simple instructions for using Nokia Share Online (and Nokia Lifeblog for elder phones).  These instructions are here.

Secondly, pixelpipe, an up and coming competitor to ShoZu, have also setup the ability to use their services via Share Online, therefore saving the need for the installation of an additional app just to upload photos.  Pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options; email, MMS (strangely very popular right now for iPhone users!), and they also have support for iPhones directly, Nokia phones (using Share Online) and finally an Android app for Android phones.  More information on all these options can be found here.

Actually, pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options, ranging from Windows app, Firefox, Linux and Mac utilities, and they even have facilities for uploading via instant messaging! pixelpipe currently support 75 services to post that content (text, photos, video, even audio files) to, with a full range of social networking sites, photo & video services, and blogging and micro-blogging platforms.

The only downside with using Share Online instead of ShoZu is that ShoZu does have the facility for offering an automatic upload option (and also can ask you to confirm before sending), whereas with Share Online it’s more of a manual process (also, ShoZu is much better at queuing multiple requests), but for some, ShoZu either doesn’t work, or isn’t worth the memory used to keep it running in the background to provide these services.

Finally, although we’ve not compared the list to work out whether it’s absolutely true; pixelpipe claim to support at least 25 more sites than ShoZu…

We’re impressed companies have worked out how to link into the limited Share Online functionality, and it’s nice to see a greater range of choice of how to upload your photos and videos, and with two of these services supporting a single upload and making the file available on multiple sites, these are worthy of further investigation for many as a method of keeping data usage down.

Today ShoZu have released their Symbian S60 5th Edition version of ShoZu, which works on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and will add support for other phones, such as the Nokia N97.  This can either be downloaded via the main ShoZu website, or directly on your phone via m.shozu.com.

Due soon, there’s an update to ShoZu’s iPhone client, taking it to v4.3.  The main feature updates are:

• It’s now easier to upload and publish multiple images
• When you upload original images you’ll retain all of the EXIF information (the details of the photo)
• There’s clickable weblinks in feeds with options to create an email or open a Safari browser
• A character counter to use when updating your status (particularly handy for Twitter fans)

This looks very interesting, and should be a useful update to iPhone users.

Last week ShoZu announced that it is now even easier to get your photos from your mobile into your Twitter feed. Although they have supported TwitPic for some while, ShoZu have been suffering from some technical problems with TwitPic, and hence are now offering the ability to work directly with Twitter.

All you need to do is to log into your account on the ShoZu website, and add Twitter as a destination.

Also, if you use ShoZu to send pictures to Facebook, there were some technical problems with that at the start of March then you’ll be glad to know that it was all fixed in a couple of days too.

If you haven’t tried ShoZu before, take pictures with your phone, and have a decent mobile data plan or easy access to Wi-Fi, you should look into it, if only as a method of backing up all your pictures online for safekeeping.

The list of supported sites is amazing, and to give you a flavour of some of the supported sites, their list includes: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, blip.tv, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, Nokia Ovi, Photobox, Picasa Web Albums, plus many blogging sites such as Blogger, Vox, Moblog, LiveJournal, Typepad and WordPress.  On top of that, you can upload pictures to BBC News, Reuters, CNN, ITV, and if that’s not enough, you can even email the pictures to friends or upload to an ftp site of your choice!  ShoZu is available for many phones, with some even coming with it pre-installed.

Brightkite have added Flickr integration into their range of functions.  If you head to Account Settings -> Sharing, you’ll now find details of how to configure Flickr uploading.  Now, when you upload a picture to Brightkite, it will automatically add them to Flickr too, and will even geotag the picture based on your current Brightkite location.

Brightkite have confirmed to us they will preserve any EXIF data, and will simply add Flickr tags based on your current location; so those who already geotag their photos when the picture is taken (or don’t update their Brightkite location sufficiently often) might need to think carefully before selecting the geotagging option.

Although many people use ShoZu to control their picture uploads, this offers another option, and ensures pictures uploaded to services like Brightkite can still end up in a single repository for long term storage.

ShoZu have been busy people. First of all, they’ve announced ShoZu for iPhone, which should be available in the next few weeks, in line with the updated Apple iPhone 2.0 firmware, and the Apple App Store. ShoZu allows you to take photos, and then ShoZu will organisee uploading those pictures to your selected sites in the background. A very popular Symbian S60 app, and now available for the iPhone, supporting the same range of sites. As well as the traditional upload facilities, there are now facilities for downloading pictures from your friends, reading and commenting on your and your friends’ photos / posts, interaction with Facebook, and geotagging your photos for you. It even supports a variety of “Citizen Journalism Sites”, such as the BBC website, Scoopt, CNN and ITV.com.

ShoZu supports many sites, and the other big news is that they have recently added support for Ovi, the new Nokia sharing site. Interestingly, two months ago they only support 29 site; now they support 46, and looking through the list the majority of picture based sites we could think of were included. Although they support Twitter, they need to expand their range of text based sites (such as Plazes and Jaiku that add location information to the messages) to complete their support and claim to be able to support the majority of Web 2.0 sites.

Some content thanks to Jonathan at atmaspheric | endeavours, and Darla Mack at her website.

When Nokia announced the Share Online! v3 beta, we contacted Nokia and discussed with them the lack of geotagging of photos – ie the embedding of the location where the photo was taken (other products such as ShoZu are used in preference to Share Online due to this missing feature). Nokia told us they would be adding this feature in due course, and yesterday they released an application which is a step towards this.

The Nokia Location Tagger will add GPS information (via the EXIF image header information) to a photograph. Although a standalone application per se, it requires Share Online! v3 to be installed right now for uploading photos (in time Nokia plan to integrate the facilities of Location Tagger directly into the Camera and Gallery applications).

Sites such as Flickr, Panoramio, and Picasa Web support displaying geotagged pictures on a map, so we expect utilities such as this to make geotagging even more prevalent in 2008.

On related Nokia geotagging points, two interesting snippets of information have come out as a result of this release:

1. Currently Nokia Sports Tracker relies upon the website linking the time a photo is taken with the GPS log to determine the position of the picture – Nokia intend to change Sports Tracker to directly embed the location information into the EXIF data on the device itself.

2. Nokia plan to integrate the Gallery with Nokia Maps, so you will be able to see where pictures were taken directly on the device.

Nokia Beta Labs have released a beta of the new version of Share Online 3.0

This adds some nice functionality from Nokia, and looks a good way to go in terms of uploading content to various websites.

Although not mentioned on the website, Nokia have confirmed to me that they plan for the final released version to support geotagging the pictures (for phones like the N95) so that once uploaded to places like Flickr they will be able to appear on the photo map. This can be done today via ShoZu, but that app isn’t particularly N95-friendly. However, it’s nice to see Nokia responded with their own apps to achieve this integration.