Brief Hands-On Report: Photoleap--Distribute Your Photos Easily and Quickly

Here's a brand new service that started last month--Photoleap. It works with Mac OS X or Windows. On the Mac, PhotoLeap is integrated with iPhoto 4. Otherwise, just drag and drop digital photos on the Photoleap application and they show up as thumbnails. Click send and Photoleap distributes them to recipients that you've chosen using their email address. If a recipient does not have Photoleap, they get an email instead noting that they can download Photoleap for free and get the photos sent them. The free version allows one to distribute up to 25 photos per message and 2 megapixels in size. There's also a $29.95/year version and a $499.95 professional version of Photoleap.

We downloaded a copy. During installation a dialog box told us that we do not have iPhoto 4 installed (correct, we have version 5.0.1) but there will be a plug-in for iPhoto 5 shortly that allows integration with iPhoto. The registration process sent us an email and the link included has to be clicked to confirm our email address before Photoleap will work. We did so and it led us to a page to download the 10-page user guide PDF file. After completing the registration process, we sent a number of photos out as a test. Photoleap worked quickly and easily in drag-and-drop mode. [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]