Technology Tip:
This article was reprinted for cnet
Like rummaging through a box of old photo albums, using Lost Photos
shows you all of the forgotten picture attachments lying dormant in your
e-mail account. What's more, it downloads them onto your machine, and
offers tools for sharing them directly with your social-network
services. You can use it with your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, RocketMail, and
yMail accounts, and even your (defunct) MobileMe account. Plus, its
developers continue to add access to others.
Lost Photos'
interface is about as straightforward as it gets. When you first open
the program, type in the log-in information for one of your e-mail
accounts, and hit Find My Photos. By default, the program ignores any
attachments smaller than 8K, which is good for avoiding company logos
and other unimportant elements from e-mail signatures. If you like, you
can change this via the options screen. You can also choose to ignore
images in GIF format or images received before a certain date.
Unfortunately, though, you can't set any other specific search
parameters and there are no downloading options.
If you've been
using the same e-mail account for a long time, then prepare to wait a
while as Lost Photos does its thing. For me, it took the program about
an hour to sift through over 6,000 e-mails and find about 1,000 photos.
So, don't be surprised if it takes more than a few minutes for you.
The great thing is that even while Lost Photos is still digging
through your account, you can start looking through old photos. You can
control the thumbnail viewer at the bottom with your arrow keys, and
click any picture to view a larger version. There are also options to
post a photo directly to Facebook or Twitter, or attach it to an e-mail
using your default client. You cannot, however, share multiple photos at
once.
As clean and simple as it is, Lost Photos' interface is
also its biggest pain point. The thumbnail viewer accommodates only four
photos and can't be resized to add more. Now, imagine my displeasure at
having to use this tiny panel to scroll through my 1,000 photos. It's
easy enough to view downloaded pictures in Windows Explorer or Mac
Finder, but still, the interface could use some major improvements. It
would also be nice to have a few sorting options in there.
Usability
issues aside, Lost Photos is an awesome app. It performs as advertised,
and is perfect for anyone with one or several e-mail addresses. In any
case, I can almost guarantee the app will come up with some old pictures
that you completely forgot about. Whether that's a good thing or a bad
thing is another story.
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