Have you ever had a relative ask you to send them photographs of your last trip but you never bothered to get a hard copy of the same. I personally wondered for a long time last year of the pains that I would have to go through to get a print, then courier them to relatives. My solution to the problem was to keep delaying till both of us forgot about it. ;) Sites like itasveer and picsquare offer printing your online photos and delivering them at quite reasonable prices. In fact @2.90Rs per pic itasveer is cheaper than the friendly neighborhood studio. Add to that a 30Rs delivery charge and you're done.
Started by a group of 4 IIT Delhi alumni, itasveer offers two kinds of services - Photo sharing and printing. Printing includes printing of photographs as well as customized souvenirs.
Let me start with photo sharing. The site has substantial photo sharing capabilities allowing you to upload and share photographs with friends. Like a lot of other sites including the likes of flickr, there is no absolute limit on the amount you can upload. But there is a more subtle - upload allowed per time limit on your account. Personally though, I don't see a the point of them doing it. With the giants pumping in huge money in this space I do not see how itasveer will match Google on uptime, reliability and even features in the long run. Photo organizing and sharing should soon start to have capabilities to identify faces and software recognizing faces after training. Clearly this is not a space which a small company wants to enter without a distinct technological leap. Even if say itasveer was able to give service comparable or even better than flickr, photobucket or picassa, I would still be highly inclined to store my photographs on the servers of a large company rather than a small startup which may not exist 2 years down the line.
That's enough of what I believe is the bad side of their business, let me look at the good one. For one the photo printing definitely fills a void. Despite several players existing today, a good execution of the service should lead to a strong success story. The idea of souvenirs with custom photographs and themes made their case stronger.
The interface of the site is soothing and I was comfortable finding my way through the site. The importer from Picassa specially impressed me. The photographs seemed to be available to itasveer very quickly and they did not even ask me for my Google password in the process. The site handles photographs from Picassa and Flickr well but lacks importers from a bunch of other tools most notably Photobucket.
Doodlepad is what they call their tool to design various souvenirs. It seemed to work well in a way that it allowed extensive customizations to designs of cups, calenders and other items. The pre-existing themes are nice and the team deserves credit for creating them.
A calender page under construction using itasveer's doodlepad
One thing that did not seem quite right in the doodlepad was the ability to create items without extensive customizations. I wondered why someone who was so bad with designs was forced to go through so much customization to create a calender when giving the tool 12 pictures and selecting a theme should be enough to create a default one. This ability may prove to be tremendously useful for the artistically challenged, which btw constitutes the majority of the technology workers at least!!
Besides that there were a couple of glitches in the site but overall things were working smoothly. I think upon making doodlepad more friendly for the dumb folk like me should be a big leap forward for them.
Wishing itasveer the best of luck for the future!!
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