fluxcapacity

We've been incognito for awhile, but that doesn't mean we've been lazy. We spent the last seven days or so building a free service, to which the rest of this post is dedicated.

If you have a digital camera and have ever tried to email photos to friends or family, you've probably been faced with an inconvenient set of tasks that goes something like this:

1. Make a copy somewhere on your computer of all the large photos you want to send so that you can resize them first in order to keep the size of the email down.
2. Use a graphic design or imaging program to resize the newly created photo copies (insert many extra steps here if your program cannot do batch resizes or if you end up surfing the web to find and install shareware that can).
3. If you use a web-based email service such as Gmail, compose a new message, then individually browse to and attach each resized photo to your message. Send.
4. Switch contexts again out of your email and clean up those photo copies you made in step one.

If you're like me, you just find this cumbersome and annoying. If you're like my Mom and Dad (who do own a digital camera that produces 12 megapixel photos), the barrier is so high that you simply don't bother to try.

To make this easier and more accessible to everyone, we've published a web-based tool we're calling Fluxify that lets you automatically resize, upload, and email photos... without the effort.

It's free, and it doesn't require you to create an account. It should work in at least Firefox and IE, and on both a Mac and a PC. We built fluxify in Silverlight, and so you'll be prompted to install the Silverlight browser plugin if you've never visited a Silverlight-enabled site before (just like the first time you run Flash).

Fluxify is interesting in that it resizes your photos before it uploads them, saving you time and bandwidth. For web developers, we think this is a pretty revolutionary cross-platform capability: You can drop the "Max file size: 500KB" fine print (just resize it on the client-side), and avoid using cumbersome ActiveX/Java alternatives to achieve the same result.

We'll be posting another entry with more technical details on how we built Fluxify, what's going on behind the scenes, and how developers can incorporate similar client-resize features into their own services on the web. For now, we've assembled some details on the about page.

Check it out and let us know what you think!