14 DAY TRIAL // Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook is a simpler and more convenient alternative to the standard image uploading procedure of the famous social network, providing a faster way for creating and handling photo albums. With its slick shortcut in the explorer context menu, it’s a promising approach to effortlessly uploading photos. Facebook scored pretty high among the masses and became popular enough to gain the attention of software developers. Devs started rolling out all sorts of tools, from notifiers and desktop widgets to browser extensions and photo uploading utilities, each of them aiming to enhance the end user’s Facebook experience. From all of these, the ones that stand out the most are those related to photo sharing, not because a picture is worth a thousand words, but because it’s worth a thousand comments.
The classic web-based photo uploader provided by Facebook is kind of questionable for both speed and stability reasons, which is why more and more users try out complementary applications to help them handle their photos in a simpler manner. Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook adds up to that software category and allows for automatic image resizing and uploading directly from the Windows Explorer context menu.
The application is free for personal use and comes wrapped in a 4 MB installer. There are no special requirements, aside from a few seconds of your time, necessary to complete the installation process. You can start the program from the icon it places on your desktop or directly from the context menu, by right clicking on the photo(s) you’d like to upload. If you choose the first launching method, a window will pop up, prompting you to select the images of interest and only after you have made your choice, you will get acquainted with the program's interface.
Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook was developed in the form of a step-by-step wizard, carrying a pleasant, yet simple look that also accounts for its ease of use. The first of the few steps you need to complete is to connect to your Facebook account. This is necessary only the first time you access the software, as the save feature prevents it from requesting your account login details every time you use it. It even provides support for multiple accounts, allowing you to select the one you want to access each time you start up the application.
However, handling multiple accounts proves to be quite a challenge for both the user and the application, as it often fails to correctly list the albums and it regularly uploads the photos to the wrong account (the last account in the list seems to be its favorite, even though you’ve selected a different one to transfer the photos to). Thus, the right thing to do in this tricky situation is to stick to one account only, if you don’t want any unexpected surprises coming your way.
In the second window of the wizard, the software enlists the most basic photo details of your account, namely: profile photo, existing albums, the corresponding number of photos in each album and the type of privacy used to protect your images from being accessed by other users. It also claims it can display the location of the albums, but you will shortly notice that it doesn't.
It disappoints with regard to displaying the existing albums accurately, and we didn’t manage to find a pattern that could predict its behavior. Sometimes, it will only list a few of them randomly and sometimes, none at all, which is a major setback that becomes obvious and troubling when you want to upload photos to one of your albums that the application fails to spot.
Creating a new album is a procedure very much similar to the one provided by the Facebook engine and requires you to fill in some fields, such as name, location, a short description and selecting a type of privacy. You can set your albums to be viewed by everyone, by friends only, by friends of friends, only by you and there’s also an option to create a custom permission. This means you can allow or deny access to specified users from your list of friends that the application makes available as soon as you opt for this feature.
As soon as you press “Create”, the application will begin the upload process, displaying a status bar for the current photo, as well as for the total progress of the transferring operation. There is no time estimation indicative, but the application proved to be quite speedy and the whole thing will be over before you know it. Uploading a hundred photos took less than ten minutes in our tests, which is more than what Facebook can do for you, time-wise.
You can track down the modifications made to each photo from the Report window that will pop up immediately after the uploading process is finished. Also, there’s an option for accessing the Facebook album directly from this window.
What we’ve found to be really appealing and well implemented is the way the resizing process can be customized. Unlike Facebook’s method that restricts you to only two options (normal or high resolution), this software allows you to set the JPEG compression factor, the interpolation method and the image size. By default, the resolution is set to a limit of 720 pixels, but you can switch it to 2048 or you can define a custom one, by manually entering the size. All of these, as well as possibilities for configuring the proxy connections are made available in the Settings window of the application.
The transferring speed is way above Facebook’s and the options it provides for resizing the photos are superior as well. Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook is a quick and speedy alternative to Facebook’s uploading procedure, but has yet to meet some major improvements. Unfortunately, at this stage of development, it’s clearly meant to handle only one account, which would actually be tolerable if it could do it right. Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
The Good
The Bad
