SnapMyLife review

Simon Bisson

We review SnapMyLife, an app that lets you upload your photos to the web - or at least that's the idea

Published on Aug 19, 2009

It wasn’t so long ago that BlackBerrys didn’t have cameras. Now that the latest devices have some of the best mobile phone cameras around, it’s unfortunate that it’s just not very easy to get the pictures off your phone to share with friends and colleagues. That’s where tools like SnapMyLife come in.

Once installed, you’ll need to sign up for an account with the SnapMyLife service. It’s just a matter of giving a user name and password (or if you’re already signed up, using existing account details). The process is one of the simplest we’ve seen – there’s no need to fill in anything more. You can fill out a more detailed profile online, but that’s not necessary unless you’re planning on using some of SnapMyLife’s more advanced features.

SnapMyLife sits on top of the BlackBerry camera application. Once you’ve take a photograph a dialog box pops up, and you can fill in a title and tags for your image. Click the upload button, and your picture will be available on your section of the SnapMyLife web site.

You can check the progress of your uploads from the application, though if there are problems with an upload there doesn’t seem to be any way to restart the connection. Uploaded pictures don’t need to be public – you can mark them private.

It’s certainly easy to use – though it’s also extremely unreliable, and if there are problems with uploading images they’re discarded from the queue. Once online, you can see your photographs on the service’s web site. You’re unable to choose alternate photohosting sites for your images, something that would be a lot more interesting than having to give your friends yet another web address for your pictures.

The SnapMyLife website is primitive compared to services like Picasa and Flickr, but it’s free and it’s easy to use. One interesting option lets you send a Twitter message every time you upload a photograph, turning your BlackBerry camera into a simple Twitter client, using SnapMyLife rather than TwitPic or YFrog. It’s not going to be your everyday Twitter tool, but it’s a useful way of quickly sharing photos with the world. SnapMyLife also has a Twitter-only photo posting tool, Snap2Twitter.

SnapMyLife’s rather ugly online experience isn’t quite how we want to share our images with the world, and we found image uploading unreliable on two different UK networks. If you want to share photos from your BlackBerry, you’re probably better off using RIM’s own Flickr tool.