GPhotoSpace: A Firefox Extension for Managing Photos in Gmail

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.