GPhotoSpace: A Firefox Extension for Managing Photos in Gmail

by Sam Dean - Dec. 11, 2008Comments (8)

Here is a very interesting little Firefox extension that caught my attention: GPhotoSpace. It requires Firefox 3 and leverages the 7GB+ of storage space that you currently get with a Gmail account for an online photo storage repository. I am constantly surprised that people still stick with the many free online storage accounts that only provide 1GB of capacity. You can get 50GB of free capacity with ADrive, and the 7GB+ you get with Gmail is generous compared to other free e-mail providers. GPhotoSpace does a nice job--within Firefox--of enhancing your Gmail account with photo album creation, uploading, and sharing features.

I happen to be using the latest beta of Firefox 3.1 at the moment, so I was a little worried that GPhotoSpace only worked with Firefox 3, which is true for many extensions. However, I successfully got it running in a minute or so. Once installed, you can launch the application from Firefox's Tools menu or by putting a small camera icon on your toolbar.

After I restarted Firefox, GPhotoSpace prompted me to log into my Gmail account. Once inside, I had several links to choose from for creating albums, sending albums to others, deleting albums, maintaining an album inbox and more. All the images are stored by Google as part of your Gmail account.

I use Flickr for working with photos frequently, and it can be very slow during peak times during the day. Uploading photos and working with albums looks easy enough with GPhotoSpace that I'll probably use it in conjunction with Flickr. I'll update this post tomorrow with more on the upload speeds GPhotoSpace gives me during peak hours, when Flickr sometimes slows down. Note that you can watch a demo of GPhotoSpace and download it here (for Windows or the Mac).

If you use this extension, I would recommend setting up a dedicated, free Gmail account for photos. The files are large in size and you don't want them encroaching on your regular e-mail.

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by John on Dec. 12, 2008

You can also use GPhotospace to upload directly to your Flickr account, using the email address they give in the Flickr Upload Email of your account settings. Create the album and send it to that Flickr email as if it were a normal email address and the pictures will arrive in your Flickr photostream.

They end up with titles and extra text which Flickr grabs from the email which GPhotospace sends, but the speed with which they arrive is good.

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by an anonymous user on Dec. 12, 2008

How does this stack up against the other email-based tools like Xoopit/Xobni that are trying to integrate with your mail clients? Given that it is a ffox plugin, I can see a little greasmonkeying to get this hooked up...

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by Tom Tom on Dec. 12, 2008

Xoopit is great. It's like ofoto for your gmail account but I think they still have a long way to go with their search functionality..

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by Shankar on Dec. 12, 2008

Does anyone know of a Xobni equivalent for the Mac?

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by an anonymous user on Dec. 12, 2008

Having your email account information (password) accessible by a third party is not generally a good idea.

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by an anonymous user on Dec. 12, 2008

where's the linux version ??