I first heard about Picaboo from Robert Scoble a few days ago. Picaboo is a way to create, share and print photo albums.
Picaboo was founded in September 2002 by Howard Field and Kevin McCurdy, and is funded by Kleiner Perkins and Softbank. They launched in May 2005.
It only works on Windows right now (although Mac user have built in software for this stuff that works very well already). Picaboo requires a client download and the album editing occurs on this client. While I’d prefer a web app (flash or ajax), having a desktop client does speed things up considerably.
Picaboo is free to download, and creating and sharing albums is also free. They generate revenue from the sale of printed albums and dvds. A printed photo album is $25 plus shipping and includes up to 20 pages. Each additional page is $2.
I spent a considerable amount of time this evening test the software, creating an album and sharing it with Brian Benzinger to test out the features.
The user interface is extremely easy to use and required little or no help or FAQ reference.You simply upload pictures, choose a format for the album, add text, etc.
There are a wide variety of album choices. You can also add music, or any other sound file (commentary, for instance). One thing I didn’t like is that the pictures must be locally stored before uploading. You cannot, for instance, give it a flickr username and use those pictures.
Once you’ve created an album, you can share it with “pals”, who can, if they’ve downloaded the picaboo software, view the album and add to it, creating their own version. You can also publish an album to the web for viewing by anyone. For some reason, the web version of albums will not play any music or other sound file you’ve assocated with it (a serious flaw in my opinion).
I used photos from last weekend’s tagcamp event to create an album, which can be viewed here. You can’t hear it on the web version, but the soundtrack I added to the album is, in my opinion, perfect. Let me know what you think.