We just came across Pixelpipe.com, a new service that allows you to easily post your digital pictures, videos, and audio files to a growing number of different services with only a few clicks, similar to what Ping.fm lets you do with text based messages. Pixelpipe supports forwarding to 33 different photo and video sharing sites, as well as most of the larger blogging and micro-blogging services. To upload photos, Pixelpipe has developed clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as for Nokia N Series phones.
Pixelpipe is being developed by an international team with offices in San Francisco and New Delhi, as well as with contract developers throughout the world. CEO and founder Brett Butterfield was the founding Imaging Architect for Ofoto (which later became Kodak Gallery), so he has a solid background in the media storage business. Pixelpipe’s architect Jacob Jay heads the New Delhi office and is the creator of PictureSync, a service that has quite a few similarities with Pixelpipe.
Supported Services
To start using Pixelpipe, you simply pick which services you want your files distributed to, enter your login credentials, and upload your files to Pixelpipe. If you have ever used Ping.fm, this process will seem quite familiar to you.
Among the services Pixelpipe supports are Facebook, Flickr, imeem, Picasa, Photobucket, Vimeo, SmugMug, Shutterfly, Box.net, Zoomr, YouTube and Kyte. Pixelpipe also supports a number of blogging and micro-blogging platforms, including Pownce, Blogger, Livejournal, tumblr, Vox, and WordPress, as well as any other platform that supports publishing through the MetaWeblog or Atom protocols. Thanks to the TwitPic integration, posting to Twitter is also covered.
Pixelpipe also allows you to forward media files via mail, which means that you can use it for a large number of services that are not supported directly, but that support uploads via email. Thanks to this, you can also send your files to services like FriendFeed or Posterous (which, by the way, now also supports parallel posting to a number of different blogging and photo sharing sites and has just announced support for video files as well).
Uploading
To upload files, Pixelpipe has developed a number of different stand-alone applications and plugins. PixelPipe also supports basic uploading by email through a custom email address (very handy if you want to send a picture from your phone, for example). For Mac users, PixelPipe has developed an iPhoto plugin and if you are a real hardcore user, you can even have it forward your files to an FTP account.
We tested the ‘Pixelpipe Uploadr’ on our Windows machine and were generally impressed with the ease of use of the application, which is a port of the Flickr Uploader. One nice feature of the desktop uploader is that it supports tagging.
Pixelpipe also provides a universal Java uploader and the company plans to release both a Firefox plugin as well as an iPhone application in the near future.
Storage
Currently, Pixelpipe is also storing the full resolution images its users upload on Amazon’s S3, but it only surfaces the thumbnails of these images at this point. Pixelpipe also utilizes Amazon’s EC2, but Brett was quick to point out that the team has built Pixelpipe without hooking into any of Amazon’s unique services in order to be able to port it over to other platforms if needed.
As Brett also told us, Pixelpipe will soon announce limits for the length of time and amount of storage the service will offer, but he also stressed that Pixelpipe is basically a set-and-forget service. You simply set up your pipes and forget.
API
Developers who want to built on top of Pixelpipe can easily do so. The service supports the Atom 0.3 and 1.0 standard, as well as the Flickr API, SMTP, and they will also support a MediaSock standard very soon. Pixelpipe is also developing its own API, which should also be available in the near future. Thanks to using these APIs, developers should be able to quickly add Pixelpipe support to their applications if they are so inclined.
Verdict
In our tests, Pixelpipe worked exactly as advertised. There was almost no noticeable delay between sending files to Pixelpipe and seeing the uploaded files on Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa , or Flickr. Thanks to its wide range of supported services, Pixelpipe looks like a winner to us.
Hey!Spread provides a similar (but paid) service for video files and Ping.fm does the same thing for short text messages. In the near future, Pixelpipe will also announce a more direct integration with Twitter and they are constantly adding new services.
Invites
Pixelpipe graciously offered 1000 invites for RWW readers, so head over here and sign up.
