15-Minute Reviews :: Photos for Grandma v1.1

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on Photos for Grandma version 1.1 by XemiComputers – An application to aid in the simplification of emailling photos to others.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Photos for Grandma is a specialized e-mail software for digital pictures. Your only job with it is to select pictures to send, type in a message subject and choose its style. The program takes care of everything else. It resizes pictures, creates a message from a chosen template and sends it through your e-mail account. It even rotates pictures automatically if they were taken with a camera that saves picture orientation information with it.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is easy to use and set up
• Limited drag and drop support somewhat intuitive
• 25 built-in email templates
• Ability to take email settings from an email client handy

Quick Cons

• Could have made browsing for photos simpler
• Requires access to a SMTP-based email address (POP/IMAP)
• Does not default a port number in manual email setup
• Would not successfully send – Blank dialog box and error ‘Sending email failed:503:SMTP server not ready for data’ and ‘Connection failed : Unable to connect to server’ or just hangs

Expansion

This application is not your normal email application. The interface for the most part is built with general simplicity in mind. Upon the first launch of the application, you are greeted by a quick guide with some useful information on using the application. After you finish this step, you are greeted by a layout which has 4 large boxes (currently empty) with grayed out Edit and Del buttons below each slow. Below that, you will see Add Contact, Help, About, Registration, and Browse arrows if you have more than one page of contacts. Upon clicking Add Contact, you are greeted by a simple interface; A random silhouette the application has chosen is found in the window, as well as a Change Photo button where you can choose a different silhouette or your own image. To the right of the image, is a name and email address box set. Below this will be found three buttons for choosing the photo size; small, Medium and Large. During my testing there wasn’t the chance to see the results, but under 100KB each image under Large photos according to the application’s feedback and these photos are not going to be print-grade for the most part.

Once you’ve added a contact, a box fills on the main screen with the image and name, as well as three buttons; Add, View and Send. When you Add photos, you will be brought into a thumbnail-view Explorer window for browsing to your photos; This isn’t the most intuitive setup as since the name of this application is simplicity. It may have been better to been able to pre-define locations for image (Such as where a digital camera dumps its photos by default) to ease the use of this application. On the flipside however, you can drag and drop selections of images from Explorer (entire folders does not work) directly to each one of the contact boxes, adding images to them – This could be easier for someone to manipulate.

At this point, you can choose to send your images. When you click Send, you can choose to send the images to more than one contact (they must be predefined however), add a message subject, and choose from one of 25 pre-defined email themes. You can preview each theme with your images included as well, or just go straight to send.

When you head to sending an email, the application by default will look at your email client (At this point I am unaware of what email clients this actually supports – I would assume Outlook Express at minimum) and pull your default email address to send from. This is a great concept. I do not have an email client configured on the test system, so I went into the manual email setup (Found by right-clicking the System Tray icon). A few notes here; This application requires an email address which supports SMTP sending. The positive side of this is that many webmail services such as Yahoo Mail and GMail offer POP/IMAP/SMTP support. When setting up the manual settings, the application does not include a default port, which some email providers don’t include this on there setup information due to the fact that most email clients default to port 25 for standard SMTP. The second issue here is that the application does not support any sort of secure emailing service such as SSL or TLS. A question is if the email client is set up for secure SMTP, how will the application handle the auto-detection of this.

During testing of this application, a rather large snag was ran into; No matter what was done, an email could not be sent out no matter what. 4 different email addresses through 4 different services (including GMail’s SMTP) and none ever worked. Under all cases, when the error occurred, a blank dialog box would pop up most of the time with a sole ‘Ok’ button on it, which you had to click to do anything. Occasionally, the application would give the ‘Incorrect settings’ dialog, giving access to the manual email settings, but not often. The error message ‘Sending email failed:503:SMTP server not ready for data’ showed up for one email address (Which was quickly tested and worked fine for attaching files). Two email addresses (Including GMail) came back with ‘Connection failed : Unable to connect to server’ even though they work fine otherwise. The final email address caused the most grief however, by locking the entire application up every time while still stating it was sending 196KB of files (Even leaving it at this screen for 20 minutes while starting the writing of the review), forcing a forced shutdown of the application every time.

Final Verdict

The concept is great for this application – While the application does seem to imply that this application is good for sending images to Grandma, this application may be good to use for Grandma (or others who want a simpler process) to send photos to others. There are some improvements for simplicity that should be made, but overall the application is sound, besides the emailing issue. The emailing issue here is the show-stopper. I do hope this issue is isolated or is only based on specific issues and that few will experience these same issues. This email issue is the biggest concern for the application and really is a bit of a concern, even while free. As for paying $19.90 ($29.90 regular price, on sale for $19.90 – License is for three computers), I could not recommend buying it until the email issue is addressed and the possibility of secured SMTP connection is incorporated.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, March 05, 2008