Kodak EasyShare

You don’t have to own a Kodak camera to use Kodak’s EasyShare photo service. Originally known as Ofoto, Kodak acquired the company in 2001 and renamed the service Kodak EasyShare Gallery in 2005. Along with Shutterfly, which also originally started in 1999, EasyShare is one of the longest running online photo sharing services.

Kodak EasyShare has both an online and an offline application, so it’s up to the user to decide which to use in what combination. The EasyShare application that you download to your PC is somewhat invasive, though, in that Kodak has not included an uninstall feature ; as a result, it’s not as painless to remove the application as we’d like.

The online and offline applications also differ in the features offered, and even in terms of how similar features are executed. For example, both have instant fix features, but with the online gallery users only see the fix after clicking the instant fix button.

With the offline client the user sees a before and after (which is a very useful feature).

The correlation between pictures available online and offline can also be somewhat confusing. The offline EasyShare client does not directly correlate to nor pull in pictures that are available online.

Users of browsers other than Internet Explorer should also be wary of the Kodak online gallery - that means you, Firefox fans ! In order to print a picture from the online gallery to a local home printer, Kodak has a feature called Print at Home. Unfortunately that feature only works with IE, as it requires a very awkward ActiveX control to be installed.

Kodak EasyShare’s offline application is free, and the online gallery offers

free unlimited online photo storage for up to 12 months from the date you first upload an image to your account. Kodak will keep the photos online as long as the member is active ; that is to say, as long as the member has made a purchase at least once every 12 months.

For prints, both the online and offline application offer only one option for service, which is not surprisingly Kodak’s own photo printing and only available via mail delivery.