In the age of social networks like Facebook and Pinterest and photo sharing websites like Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, there is no shortage of tools you can use to share photos with family and friends over the Internet. Abelssoft Picolino is another tool that allows you to share photos with family and friends. Let’s see if it is worth your time.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Picolino is a program that allows users to upload photos onto Picolino.net and share them with friends and family; photos are uploaded and organized in albums, not individually.

Pros

• Allows users to upload was many photos in an album as desired
  • Supports JPG/JPEG, BMP, PNG, and GIF images
• Users can create as many albums as they want
• Albums can optionally be password protected
• Once created, links to albums can be easily shared with via email, Facebook, Twitter, or old fashion copy + paste
• After albums are created, you can edit or delete albums if desired — including the ability to delete individual photos inside an album instead of the whole album
• Gives users the ability to add comments to photos they add to albums and apply gray, sepia, contrast, or sharpness “optimization” to photos
• Albums are not publicly shown on Picolino.net; even if an album is not password protected, the only way someone could find an album is if they have the URL
  • Note: Picolino.net does not block search engines from indexing albums, so just because albums aren’t publicly shown on Picolino.net does not mean some random stranger cannot see your photos (they may find the link to your album on a search engine). So if you want photos to be truly private on Picolino.net, then use a password
• Once an album is uploaded, individual images can be downloaded by whomever is viewing it
• Extremely easy to use — literally point and click

Cons

• Only supports JPG/JPEG, BMP, PNG, and GIF images. There are other image formats that people may want to share.
• Does not support sharing of videos
• You must create an album every time you want to upload images. This makes sense when you want to upload a bunch of images but it won’t let you, for example, upload just one or two images without creating an album.
• Converts all uploaded images to JPG, so if someone downloads your image from the online album then they get it in JPG format and not necessarily the original format of the image
• Picolino.net does not have a mobile version, so viewing images on mobile devices is not very easy
• Also viewers of albums to download photos individually but does not allow viewers to download photos in batch (i.e. download all or multiple photos at once)
• You must register an account (registration is free) to use this program
• Online albums have “full screen” mode but photos are not really shown in full screen or full size
• Requires .NET Framework 4.0
• The server for Picolino.net is based in Germany, so everyone that does not live near Germany will face relatively slow upload speeds. For example, it took two minutes for me to upload 22 photos that are 2.13 MB in total size. That is slow and will only get slower as load increases on the website (if load increases). I’m in USA.
• Has a “freeware” version but the “freeware” version limits you to uploading 50 photos only. You need the “premium” (aka paid) version to be able to upload unlimited photos.

Discussion

I’m a bit baffled with Picolino. It is a program that allows you to upload photo albums onto Picolino.net to share with friends and family. The program works just like described — that isn’t what baffles me. Rather, what baffles me is why the hell would anyone want to pay 19.90€ to be able to share photos online with friends and family. Ladies and gentlemen, this is 2013. 2013, not 1993 or 2003. There are literally dozens upon dozens of websites that allow you to share photos (and videos, something that Picolino does not support) for free. Facebook. Flickr. Photobucket. Imgur. Picasa. Pinterest. Dropbox. ImageShack. Instagram. Shutterfly. Minus. And so many more.

Sure some of these online photo sharing services have limitations on how many images free users can share (e.g. Flickr only allows 200 viewable images for free accounts) while others don’t limit number of images but rather size (e.g. Dropbox has 2 GB of free storage, however you want to use it, and ImageShack limits free users to 5 GB of free storage). However, there are also some that have no limits and are intended just for the purpose of sharing photos, such as Instagram, Facebook, Shutterfly, etc.

Honestly, if you really need it then I’d even recommend paying for a paid image sharing service (e.g. Flickr Pro, which costs roughly $25 per year but allows unlimited photos and videos) rather than going with Picolino. Why? Well, for one thing Picolino is nothing but basic image sharing. For example, it doesn’t even properly support mobile devices. Sure mobile devices can view albums, but Picolino.net does not have a mobile version — mobile devices load the website’s desktop version. Secondly, you never know when Abelssoft will shutdown Picolino and your images will be lost forever. When you go with a big name in image sharing, you have some assurance that your images are safe — that service won’t be wiped out any time soon and, if it is about to go down, you will likely be given the ability to download your photos first. You have no such assurance about Picolino. Abelssoft is a relatively small developer/company, so they may decide that the costs to keep Picolino.net’s service up and running is higher than the income the program brings in and cut the plug on it. What will you do then? Yeah, nothing.

Conclusion and download link

Picolino does what it claims to do: it allows you to easily share photos with friends and family. However, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would want to use this program/service. It is 2013 people, 2013. There is no place for a subpar program/service like Picolino that wants you to pay 19.90€ for the luxury of sharing photos (/sarcasm). I really don’t understand why Abelssoft developed this program/service. What are the value-added features in Picolino? I see none. Why do some developers think they can develop and sell subpar programs/services and people will blindly purchase…

You are welcome to grab Picolino if you want it, but I recommend staying away. As I’ve said multiple times now, Picolino has no features that make this program stand above the crowd. In fact, it lacks some features which make it subpar, notably lack of proper support for mobile devices. If you want to share photos with friends or family, use a free image sharing service, cloud storage, or social network. I’ve listed quite a few in the Discussion section above and there are even more out there. Pick one.

Price: 19.90€

Version reviewed: v1.8 (2013)

Supported OS: Windows XP/Vista/Win7/Win8

Requies .NET Framework 4.0

Download size: 1.5 MB

VirusTotal malware scan results: 0/47

Is it portable? No

Abelssoft Picolino homepage